Sankei Miniatuart kit: Diorama MP03-38 Shrine

[JanW]

I am very impressed with the quality and detail of this Sankei Miniatuart shrine. Everything fits perfectly and it makes a beautiful diorama. In fact, the detail is better than plastic Tomytec kits although a lot more work to put together! 

Now I am looking for further models from Sankei. Do they make a pagode? 

[Pauljag900]

Looks good mate

Take a look on eBay shop called “plazzajapan “ they do lots of the Sankai kits

[bill937ca]

Sankei made museum models (and still does) before it offered its Miniatuart line. Tomytec diorama line is one of the offerings of a global toy company.

 

http://www.m-sankei.co.jp/02museum_model/index-kakusyu.html

 

 

[bill937ca]

Pagoda

https://www.ebay.com/itm/Sankei-MP03-11-Temple-Five-story-Pagoda-1-150-N-scale-/361924655950?hash=item544463fb4e

 

Sankei 1/150

http://stores.ebay.com/Plaza-Japan/1-150-N-Scale-/_i.html?_dmd=1&_fsub=1407213010&_sasi=1&_sc=1&_sid=169030440&_sop=1&_trksid=p4634.c0.m322&_vc=1

 

[cteno4]

Jan, 

 

nice work. They are very lovely kits, bit of fiddling to assemble but it gets easier with more and you get into their mind set!

 

quite a selection and things don’t seem to go out of production for super long periods, probably because an additional production run is only some laser cutter time! Packaging as well can easily be done in any quantity.

 

hobby link japan seems to usually give the best discount on them. I think they don’t give a great margin to retailers as discount seems less than usual stuff on most sites. I did experiment a couple of months back and ordered a backordered sankei kit from hlj that was also out of stock everywhere else I looked. It took about 6 weeks but it came! Plus with hlj virtual warehouse system you have 60 days for a few backorders to come in at different times to bundle the shipping.

 

 https://hlj.com/search/go?w=Sankei

 

I have a pile of sankei kits I want to get on this summer once all the craziness dies down here.

cherrs

 

jeff

[EF57]

it is never going to die down.  when will you learn?

[bill937ca]

Soon the JRM layout will be finished.  

[Martijn Meerts]

I have the Sankei Spirited Away bath house kit. It’s a bit daunting though, so haven’t started it yet :)

 

they have some really nice kits though, I was always a bit skeptical about “paper kits”, but the detail in these is far better than plastic kits. 

[JanW]

Thanks a lot for all your reassuring words. I now went on and ordered the Chinese restaurant, the bookstore, the town factory and indeed the Pagode. Hope they will arrive soon!

Does any of you have experience with fitting interior lights (LEDs) in them?
I am especially worried about making the walls light-proof.  The Tomytec models are a bit challenging too but I managed to light proof these.

[Martijn Meerts]

I haven't added lighting in mine yet, but I do it somewhat different anyway. I usually light up specific windows by adding an LED to them, and then add a box of black cardboard behind it. I never really light up entire houses with just 1 or 2 lights, so I never really need to light-proof complete walls.

 

However, Sankei uses good quality cardstock for their kits, and more often than not, the walls are multiple layers (backing layer and a detail layer), so light leaking should be fairly minimal. If necessary you can always try to paint the interior black.

 

[disturbman]

Agreed, Sankei kits should have minimal light leaking through walls. What is possible though is that the light might leak from the joints between the different plates/walls.

[cteno4]

The good thing with sankei kit engineering is they usually use two layers for most walls as Martijn noted and they usually have the corner joints then as 2 interlocking rabit joints which help a lot with light leaks and makes a very nice and strong joint.

 

Lighting, especially with leds, needs to get turned way down and also shaded with some foil or card stock so its not sending inllumiation all over. Leds at full power are just totally unrealistic in the amount of light you throw from one source. Would be like having a 10,000 watt light in the middle of your house! Use a variable resistor to turn the leds way down and think of using more than one in different spots with a wall or partial wall in between. Buildings also rarely have all the windows lit, so blocking some off or walling off some of the building is good. 

 

if you find light leaks at joints or in a thin spot in a wall you can either just add another layer of chipboard behind the wall or foil. I’m not a fan of suing foil other than to make a little light shade sort of for an led as on walls I find it does an odd reflective look to the lighting, but that me. For joints you can glue in little L strips of chipboard or square or L styrene stock, or do a bead of thick paint like the tee shirt paint (used by plastic modelers a lot that use internal lighting a lot).

 

even the internal wall colors can effect your building lighting as a lot of the light going out windows is reflected light. Internal walls are rarely black or dark, usually white or light colored. So just adding a layer of white or beige paper on the inside walls can help even up the lighting and make it look more like the real thing. 

 

One thing to realize is we rarely view lit building much from the distance we view them on a layout. We tend to have a much more up close view in our minds eye. One of those situations we are modeling with the wrong view kind of wired into our heads. It’s like curbs, we have them wired into our heads at a few feet to deal with walking or 10-20’ for driving but not at all from 200’+ like we look at them on a layout, where in real life all you usually see is the change in color from cement for sidewalk to asphalt for the road, but our up close minds eye wants to see that vertical face at 200’+ model viewing so we make 12-18” high curbs! To be prototypical they would be about less than one mm high.

 

again, usually if there are light leaks other than an open seam or joint, it’s a sure sign the led is just up way too bright and needs some internal blocking as well.

 

cheers

 

jeff

[JanW]

Just tested and found that only the off-white board isn't light-tight. The other boards are OK. I'll give it a go once my houses arrive. 

Indeed Jeff, usually the LEDs are too bright!

 

Cheers!

[cteno4]

Yep 10 cent pots solve it and let you adjust it to the Goldilocks point!

 

usually a second inner layer of chipboard does the trick on thin walls. Just cut out the window. Holes like 1mm bigger than the wall windows holes. Also check as most all the main walls are usually doubled up eventually in construction.

 

jeff

[TCC Railroad]

On 3/6/2018 at 9:04 AM, cteno4 said:

Jan, 

 

nice work. They are very lovely kits, bit of fiddling to assemble but it gets easier with more and you get into their mind set!

 

quite a selection and things don’t seem to go out of production for super long periods, probably because an additional production run is only some laser cutter time! Packaging as well can easily be done in any quantity.

 

hobby link japan seems to usually give the best discount on them. I think they don’t give a great margin to retailers as discount seems less than usual stuff on most sites. I did experiment a couple of months back and ordered a backordered sankei kit from hlj that was also out of stock everywhere else I looked. It took about 6 weeks but it came! Plus with hlj virtual warehouse system you have 60 days for a few backorders to come in at different times to bundle the shipping.

 

 https://hlj.com/search/go?w=Sankei

 

I have a pile of sankei kits I want to get on this summer once all the craziness dies down here.

cherrs

 

jeff

I have put together 5 sankei kits in the last couple weeks and have about 7 more in the pile to go. I have found them to be well made with great details. It is important to look carefully at how the pieces go together though or you will end up with pieces that don't go fit the way they are supposed to. Don't ask me how I know this. 

[cteno4]

Lol! My usual warning on sankei kits! Test fit and put part numbers and orientations on back of parts as many are very close in dimension and orientation can get flipped! Don’t ask me why my first sankei, the little police office is about 4mm shallower than it should be! Lesson learned and fixed and glad I started with the smallest, cheapest structure first!

 

cheers

 

jeff

[Martijn Meerts]

My first Sankei kit was a mess after building it, I didn't have the right tools at the time, and I may have not read the instructions all that carefully ;)

 

[JanW]

In the mean time, the mailman delivered a few more Sankei kits including the Pagode.  This will keep me busy for a while!

[Pauljag900]

Love the pagoda,looking forward to the assembly report.

[Quinn]

Some lovely work, the shrine.

 

I too love these kits and have built a few; just picked up again after the winter to build a more "Japanese-looking" diorama. I made the mistake of choosing a complicated one among the first two bought. Thankfully their assembly drawings are clear enough not to need to read Japanese. 

 

The lighting is with wired SMD Leds. I'll start using pre-set pots in some models in future. So far it's been soldering the LED wires direct to resistors without using stripboard so they can be hidden in the structures. 

 

So...this was my first couple of kits. What's learned is that photographs reveal things the eye misses! I've since disguised the bent pillar to the right of the Nagasaki House. I hadn't space for the full garden and frontage but tried to catch some of the characteristics from photos. The forecourt lights up as the original but that doesn't show in the photos. I've improved a bit since, so I hope! 

 

[Quinn]

On 07/03/2018 at 6:05 PM, cteno4 said:

 

if you find light leaks at joints or in a thin spot in a wall you can either just add another layer of chipboard behind the wall or foil. I’m not a fan of suing foil other than to make a little light shade sort of for an led as on walls I find it does an odd reflective look to the lighting, but that me. For joints you can glue in little L strips of chipboard or square or L styrene stock, or do a bead of thick paint like the tee shirt paint (used by plastic modelers a lot that use internal lighting a lot).

 

 

 

 

 

I've just hit this one by accident and it could be down to poor gluing. The MP3-06 Restaurant has a complicated roof arrangement and is one of the first I've built with something that doesn't quite fit - the upper floor ceiling: the slots in the long wall are too low by about a millimetre. After checking it wasn't me I had to cut off the locating tabs. Before all this I'd checked for light leakage and all was ok. However, messing around trying to get this ceiling to fit I prized the walls to the front apart enough to allow light to leak, small but obvious. Now I have to find a way to fill the gap. It'll need a sliver of card and careful gluing. A 3.5x optovisor job....

 

Well to warn modellers!

[Quinn]

On 21/03/2018 at 7:15 PM, JanW said:

In the mean time, the mailman delivered a few more Sankei kits including the Pagode.  This will keep me busy for a while!

 

Is there a hope you'll show the finished Pagoda?

 

You've persuaded me to buy the Shrine set. It'll go in plaza's shopping cart later today. 

.

 

[cteno4]

Nice job Quinn! Really well thought out scene.

 

yeah lighting does not scale well and it also appears very differently in photos than directly to the eye. Part is in perception as our minds perceive a photo differently than looking at the real model as we move around the real thing and it triggers different visual memories and we build a different picture in our heads. The picture we make in our heads (what I’m always referring to as the mind’s eye) is bases a lot on previous visual memories we have and experience as well as imagination (some are very literal and others very imaginative). This means each of us will see a slightly different picture of a scene and this is amplified more in person than in a static photo. Our eyes and brians also are different photoreceptors and processors than in cameras or film. We see the point lights differently as well as contrasts, lighting levels and colors when viewing the real thing usually. It’s a real art! I worked with some product lighting folks way back and they would talk of how hard it was to get a shot of an item that matched in the viewers brian that they got from a quick glance of the real thing. Our brains are weird and wonderful beasts!

 

again kudos on the work there!

 

cheers

 

jeff

[gavino200]

On 3/8/2018 at 9:53 AM, Martijn Meerts said:

My first Sankei kit was a mess after building it, I didn't have the right tools at the time, and I may have not read the instructions all that carefully ;)

 

 

I'm about to start my first Sankei kit. What would you consider to be the correct tools? What glue do you recommend?

[cteno4]

Gavin,

 

few past posts with some of what you are looking for

 

jeff

 

 

 

Edited May 14, 2018 by cteno4