Ok, I finally got a chance to post some progress shots, such as they are. It's hard to show seam work as "progress" but I have been spending considerable time making the seam between the hangar walls and the main hull presentable. But first, let's take a look at what I needed to do at the bow.
The hanger floor and the deck at the bow and stern are all one piece. When I glued these units together, there was a need to clamp the bow area to ensure that the deck was level with the edges of the hull. Unfortunately, things did not turn out that way as the clamp, instead of contacting the deck, actually was touching the top of the cylindrical protrusion seen in the below pic. I didn't notice this and things looked fine when I set the assembly aside to dry overnight but when I checked in the morning, the softened plastic had slowly given way and caused the deck to settle and cure much deeper in the hull than it was supposed to be.
To fix this, I opted for lopping off the deck details and building the depressed area back up with layers of styrene card which were then
blended in with the surrounding areas with a file, sandpaper, and surface primer. The deck details were then replaced with plastic rod and other details were added. The anchor chains are PE parts and, by themselves, look pretty clumsy. However, the chains are mostly hidden under the bow gun tubs so I decided to keep them and add very short lengths of solder to add more depth to them. The below pic shows the result thus far.
One of the aspects I'm watching out for is the order of assembly as there are a number of areas that really ought to be painted before assembling more sections to or around them. On such area is the rear hanger wall (below) that will be largely buried under an extensive overhanging deck, which is the part with the 20mm guns and director shown in the third pic of post #49. The wall is provided on the after-market WEM PE set as there are some inaccuracies on the kit supplied part. WEM would have you just glue the thin PE part in by itself but I decided that the part was too flimsy to have any chance of staying there with further handling so I glued the wall to a piece of thick plastic card with door openings cut in where needed. Centered between the two closed doors is a rather nifty PE fire hose real and I further enhanced the wall by adding the fire water header which is simply a few lengths of bent solder CA glued to the wall. Note also the surface blending and gap filling that need to be done around the gun tub. This was accomplished by "melting" stretched sprue into the larger gaps with Tamiya Extra Thin Cement and applying surface primer followed by delicate sanding.
Following are a few pics showing the joints between the outside hangar walls and the main hull. The long seam was a challenge to line up perfectly on both sides so there were a number of areas that needed blending. All of the work so far has been achieved by building up the misaligned surfaces with layers of Tamiya primer and successive passes of wet sanding using a curved backer for the paper. I found that a Type FF wooden biscuit was perfect for this purpose. One of the difficulties here is that the molded-in degaussing cable crossed the areas that needed blending so I ended up cutting some of this flush since it would have been impossible to sand around it. I'll need to replace the lost details with appropriately sized stretched sprue when all this is done.
There's also a seam along the entire length of the torpedo belt that needed to be filled as the edges of the mating parts here are not molded with a sharp edge.
The large blister under the rear gun tub also needed attention and this area was treated with good old Squadron Putty.
That's all the visible progress I have to show for now. Thanks for looking in.