Work In Progress-Nichimo 1:48 scale, Ki-45, “Toryu”

Hello Folks!

It's been awhile since I lasted posted anything on here.

This is a project I have been kicking around for a long time, and finally decided to jump off the fence and get busy.

Most of my glue sniffing buddies have either built, are building, or are planning to build the Hasegawa kit. It's newer, better detailed and engineered, so why not, right?

I've had a few of these in the stash, and I wanted to be different. My friend Bill's son, Kyle had built one, OOB, and it looked awesome. OOB with this kit though, it had a few issues with extremely soft detail in both the cockpit and wheel wells.

In my stash, I also had Lone Star Models, cockpit and wheel well detail sets designed for this kit. The problem is, both sets are not very good. They suffer from warping, fit issues and poor quality castings. Had the casts been better, they would have been excellent, because the detail in them is actually pretty good. In addition to that, the instruction sheet is poorly drawn, and confusing. Even as I type this, I still am not clear on how I'm going to get the landing gear and retraction struts in place...

As of right now, I have the basic airframe together. Fuselage, tail and wings are all attached, and other than a good sized seam at the port wing which was sealed with stretched sprue rod and plastruct strips. Next step will be a few coats of Mr. Surfacer to seal any left over holes or cracks.

14 additional images. Click to enlarge.