The climbing tower crane

Cranes like the ones shown in this photo are a common sight in Tokyo.  Because this type of crane does not have the range of the larger ones with horizontal beams there are often several on larger construction sites.

I saw this kit in a hobby shop on one of our trips to Japan and knew immediately this was what I wanted for the subway construction scene.

Now that the work on that construction scene has started I can finally put this kit together.  It was not clear to me from looking at the package but when I opened it I was pleasantly surprised to find that there are 2 crane kits included plus some great little construction scene details.




Before purchasing this crane kit I had not heard of this company, Studio Mid.  Turns out that they have several other N scale kits for modeling construction scenes.  I have not seen anything from them on ebay but here is a LINK to the HobbySearch.com store with all the Studio Mid N scale products. 

The crane kits come in red or yellow. I would have preferred the red but when I bought it they only had yellow so I painted my cranes reefer orange.

I made some substantial looking support bases from styrene tile with another layer of .040 styrene under it.  Then the crane bases were attached to this with ACC glue.

To highlight the relief in sections of the tower, I brushed on some Testors black weathering wash and then wiped it off before it had completely set.



In the lead photo of the prototype the crane on the right is seen adding or removing a section from it's own tower.  Each crane in this kit comes with two towers, one longer and one shorter.  Both represent several actual sections attached together.  I used the longer towers and then cut the shorter ones into their individual sections and set them in the support area.

These are now completed with the exception of stringing the thread through, that might prove to be the most difficult part.