mwb

Hi Mike,
OK, no kisses!! Seriously though, I really hope it helps out. You might contact him and see if he can mill some specific sizes for you. It could open up a new source of business for him.
Mark

I just looked at the thin pieces I have and the surface is not sanded smooth, kinda rough. The wider pieces are smooth. I'm sending you a pm. 

Hi Mike,
OK, no kisses!! Seriously though, I really hope it helps out. You might contact him and see if he can mill some specific sizes for you. It could open up a new source of business for him.
Mark

Hi Mike,
 
I know you already have your stock of wood for your project, but this might be an alternative for you and any of the other members. This gent does inlays for  instruments/furniture and has stock of ebony and holly and others. I have ordered both ebony & holly strips and sheets from him and they are flawless. Very nice material. With Jeff retiring, I've ordered from him also - again, flawless product - this may be another source. First link is the home page. Second and third gets you to the good stuff. Hope this helps. Mark
 
http://inlaybanding.com/   http://inlaybanding.com/odds.html   http://inlaybanding.com/stringing.html

Hi Mike,
 
I know you already have your stock of wood for your project, but this might be an alternative for you and any of the other members. This gent does inlays for  instruments/furniture and has stock of ebony and holly and others. I have ordered both ebony & holly strips and sheets from him and they are flawless. Very nice material. With Jeff retiring, I've ordered from him also - again, flawless product - this may be another source. First link is the home page. Second and third gets you to the good stuff. Hope this helps. Mark
 
http://inlaybanding.com/   http://inlaybanding.com/odds.html   http://inlaybanding.com/stringing.html

Hi Mike,
 
I know you already have your stock of wood for your project, but this might be an alternative for you and any of the other members. This gent does inlays for  instruments/furniture and has stock of ebony and holly and others. I have ordered both ebony & holly strips and sheets from him and they are flawless. Very nice material. With Jeff retiring, I've ordered from him also - again, flawless product - this may be another source. First link is the home page. Second and third gets you to the good stuff. Hope this helps. Mark
 
http://inlaybanding.com/   http://inlaybanding.com/odds.html   http://inlaybanding.com/stringing.html

Hans,
 
Now that's beautiful. Your first scratch build? Wow!!
 
Best regards,
 
Mark

Hans,
 
Now that's beautiful. Your first scratch build? Wow!!
 
Best regards,
 
Mark

Hans,
 
Now that's beautiful. Your first scratch build? Wow!!
 
Best regards,
 
Mark

Hans,
 
Now that's beautiful. Your first scratch build? Wow!!
 
Best regards,
 
Mark

Hans,
 
Now that's beautiful. Your first scratch build? Wow!!
 
Best regards,
 
Mark

Hans,
 
Now that's beautiful. Your first scratch build? Wow!!
 
Best regards,
 
Mark

After the deckclamps I build the 2 main decks
 
 







 
And here is the status per today:
 
I am working on the gunports now.
 




 

I purchased this kit from a dealer in Japan, having found it on the Internet some time ago. This is a very accurate model of a traditional fishing boat from a region called Tosa on Shikoku Island, which is one of more Southern of the 4 main islands of Japan. The kit was produced by a company called Thermal Studio, which is actually a manufacturer of glider kits. I suspect that there is some personal connection between the owner and the Tosa Traditional Boat Society. The manufacturer indicates that this kit is made under the supervision of that group.
 
I won't go into too many general kit details, since I already discussed the details of the kit on Model Ship World here: http://modelshipworld.com/index.php/topic/12018-110-scale-japanese-fishing-boat-kit-from-thermal-studios/
 
 

 
 
The build begins with the floor piece. There are apparently different regional names for this and I don't know what the name is in the Tosa region. The term カワラ, or Kawara, is shown a lot for it in the instructions, so I assume that's the regional term in Tosa. I'll have to send an inquiry about these things at some point.
 
The first step in the kit is to bevel the bottom edge of the kawara. To aid in this, there are laser scribed lines. Interestingly enough, the sheet with this part is actually scribed on both sides. I've never seen that in a model kit. This means that the manufacturer had to register the wood and the laser in some way so that the cuts on one side line up with those on the other side.
 

 
 
Something interesting about working with the Japanese cedar. Where those dark lines in the grain show, that's where the wood is more dense. When carving, you have to be aware of that because those lines are harder to cut through than the lighter colored wood in between. These dark lines are also harder for the laser to cut through. So, if you look in those etched trapezoidal holes, you can see lines of wood that line up perfectly with the grain. I started to trim out those ridges in the cut-outs. There aren't that many really, so I'll probably continue with that as I go.
 
The other issue with those lines is that they can make the laser scribed lines very hard to follow. Woody Joe uses laser scribing to mark the beveling lines on their kits too, but they use light color Hinoki, so I 've never had to deal with hard to see scribed lines before.
The next thing is to partially cut through the Kawara at the dashed line.
 
 

 
 
This is where the bottom of the boat angles upwards. In his book Japanese Wooden Boatbuilding, Douglas Brooks describes this as Kirimage (kee-ree-mah-gay), or "cut bending". I don't know about the Tosa boats, but the Aomori boat he worked on used a technique like this, though there's more to it.
 
In my case, I thought this was a good opportunity to bring out my Japanese hobby saw, which is a very thin pull-type saw. The problem was that it was too thin. It cut nicely, but didn't leave room for the piece to bend upward. So, I pulled out my old razor saw and I cut the line several times, holding the blade at different angles, so that it would cut more of a V-groove.
 
 

 
 
With that done, I could add the floor frames. These are permanent frames, thought a long strong-back piece serves as a temporary alignment guide. This was interesting because so many Japanese boats are frameless, or close to it. At some point I'll look into this further. On the real boat, these may have been added after the planks were in place.
There was a fair amount of char on the edges of these and all the other wood pieces. The kit includes a large flat sanding block that made clean-up of these parts pretty easy. I did notice that there was a fair amount of smudging on the wood faces though. I cleaned these up as best I could. I used the sanding block, but tried to keep working very lightly.
 
 

 
 
I test fit the stem to how it was all going to work. The stem is made up of an inner piece and an outer one. The outer stem gets added later, but the inner one goes on next. I wanted to make sure I understood the design before continuing.
 
 

 
 
First, I had to made sure the strong-back was properly aligned. The main issue was to keep it centered and perpendicular to the Kawara. The piece is also to be spot glued at the very ends to keep it in place until it is removed in a later step.
 
 

 
 
Here's where I'm at now. Steps 1 through 6 have been completed. I have only to bevel the stern most frame and the transom to complete step 7, then comes the lower planking. Japanese boats use very wide planks that are often very thick. On the Tosa wasen, the planks appear to be as much at 18" wide.
 
 

 
 
I went ahead and started prepping the lower planks. Where I am cutting in the photo, the laser does not completely cut the dark lines of the wood, so I have to go over this with the X-Acto a few times on each side to cut the pieces free.
  Clare

Actually, it makes more sense for me to review the kit here so it's not mixed in with the build itself.
 
 
The kit is not all that heavy, about 1-1/2 pounds, but it's in a long box. I think this kicked the shipping cost up a bit, which was just about $30. Still, a ship model kit, particularly one this rare, for around $170 total, is not bad. That's just about what I paid for the Woody Joe Hacchoro and the Yakatabune kits I bought from Zootoyz.
 
 

 
 
Having ordered through Amazon Japan, the only seller of the kit did not ship internationally, so I had it sent to someone that then re-shipped it for me from Japan and they didn't charge me any service fees. He's done this twice for me and I don't want to impose on him any further. There are companies specifically set up to forward packages from Japan. I just finished setting up an account with one called Tenso.com. Next time, I'll try them out.
 
By the way, it looks like I may have been wrong about this kit being out of production. I thought it was no longer manufactured because the company that makes it, Thermal Studios, primarily makes large model glider kits and doesn't list the Tosa Wasen kit at all. However, I emailed them about it and if we understood each other correctly, they produce the kit. Perhaps it's more of a local item since they are apparently close to Tosa, Japan, and seem to have some kind of connection with the Tosa Traditional Boat Society.
 
 

 
 
The kit itself is basically made up entirely of several laser cut sheets, plus a small bag with various kinds of parts, some other separate laser cut and milled wooden parts, instruction booklet, plan sheet, and even a sanding block.
 
 

 
 
The laser cut sheets are made from Sugi (that's "Sue" plus "Gee" with a hard "G") or Japanese cedar, just like the real Tosa boats. Sugi is aromatic, though not as strong scented as Hinoki used in so many Woody Joe kits. The parts are laser etched with Japanese characters to identify them. This makes locating parts a little more time consuming than if they were numbered. But, I guess it's just a matter of pattern matching.
 
 

 
 
The bag of parts contains all the milled wood parts, all short pieces. Also in the parts bag is the metal anchor, the anchor rope, metal rings and fastener. The kit also includes a roll of yellow hobby masking tape, and for some reason, some plastic applicator tips used for applying CA glue.
 


 
 
As expected, the instruction booklet is all in Japanese. The black and white printed book is 26 pages long and includes a parts diagram on the back cover, showing all the laser cut parts on their sheets. The diagram is pretty small and you really need a magnifying glass to read it. But, magnified, the part identifiers all appear to be readable. Instructions are divided up into 41 steps, with each step being clearly illustrated and each looking to be pretty simple steps.
 
 

 
 
Time will tell if the Japanese text printed in the booklet is really necessary or if the model can be build solely by the drawings. But, in addition to the booklet, there is also on large plan sheet that gives a nice overview of the boat at full scale, which, by the way, is 1/10 scale.
 
 

 
 
Overall, this looks like a really nice kit and it's not that expensive. An additional bonus is that the  manufacturer, Thermal Studios, created a blog showing photos of the construction steps. This is really nice because it reinforces the written/printed instructions, giving you another view of the steps. Also, using Bing or Google translators, you can view the blog pages in English (or whatever your native language). This isn't always that great, as the translation can be pretty questionable, but it often helps.
 
Thermal Studio's Building a Wasen Blog
 
 
Having attended Douglas Brooks' talk at the NRG conference this past October, and having been reading through his book on Japanese Wooden Boatbuilding, I can say that this kit looks very authentic and true to the way that the traditional Japanese shipwrights would have actually constructed their boats.
 
This kit would make an ideal study project for someone who is interested in following the work described in Mr. Brooks' book. Personally, I've been planning on scratch building the Urayasu Bekabune that he discussesin his book. I think that building this kit first will help me a long ways towards understanding Japanese boatbuilding so that I can eventually attempt that scratch project.
 
 
Clare

Hey Clare,
 
Thanks for the reply and the heads up on the link - I edited it so folks will see it - and also thank you for the link to get through for ordering, I would have scratched my head with no reply from them. I'll try again.
 
Mark

Hey Clare,
 
Thanks for the reply and the heads up on the link - I edited it so folks will see it - and also thank you for the link to get through for ordering, I would have scratched my head with no reply from them. I'll try again.
 
Mark

Hi Clare,
 
Thank you for this post on the Tosa Wasen kit. I just sent an email asking to order one, hopefully it will get through. I've been scouring the blog and downloading as many build pics as I can and have almost 200 so far. Don't know if anyone has been to this link but there are five pages with some interesting pics.
 
http://thermal2.exblog.jp/i65/
 
Second pic down shows Douglas Brooks with ?
 
Enjoy, Mark

Hi Clare,
 
Thank you for this post on the Tosa Wasen kit. I just sent an email asking to order one, hopefully it will get through. I've been scouring the blog and downloading as many build pics as I can and have almost 200 so far. Don't know if anyone has been to this link but there are five pages with some interesting pics.
 
http://thermal2.exblog.jp/i65/
 
Second pic down shows Douglas Brooks with ?
 
Enjoy, Mark