Tonight (and last night) I made some good progress with building the small parts for the Hien.
Here you can see the results of this, by following along with me as I explain the steps that I took.
The landing gear parts were assembled, and are now waiting for paint.
The main gear struts are little works of art. The details are very crisp.
I took this one step further, and drilled out the lightening holes in the torque struts. This extra step will hopefully be worth the time and effort. I'm also thinking about adding some brake lines... but only after the parts are painted.
The wings were glued together, and the small "filler" parts for the cannon (or Machine Gun) applications were glued in place. The kit provides several different plugs that fit into recesses in the wings. There are also a separate set of plugs for the underside of the wings for the empty casing dump chutes.
On the inside of the wings, there are molded in structures that represent the inner ribs for the flaps.
The upper wing halves also have wing ribs molded in place. It wouldn't be too hard for someone to drop the flaps, as these details are otherwise hidden. The only drawback(s) to doing this is the corresponding area on the fuselage is not done. This area of fuselage / wing fillet hangs over the flaps. The main reason for not dropping the flaps is that most of the time you see the flaps only in the "raised" position.
But by having the inner structure available there is an added bonus... and it gives you options for scratch building if you wanted to. It would make for a cool diorama maintenance scene...
I assembled the radiator housing and airflow exit ramp. In this next picture you can also see one of the horizontal stabilizers, and the tail wheel assembly.
The wings will be held in proper alignment with a main spar assembly, that is glued to the bottom fuselage plug. This is a very robust structure, and will come in handy when I'm adding the foil on this build.
Here in this next picture you can see the results of the work done over the past two nights. I did not glue the wings in place on the spar. They are simply placed there to show you how they fit onto the spar assembly. You can also see the other little parts, such as the gun sight and instrument panel. I also built the oil cooler and the airspeed venturi device that will be eventually installed on the side of the fuselage near the cockpit. Both horizontal tail assemblies are visible here too. These tail section parts will eventually get painted in a bright red color... It should look very good with a bare metal foil finish.
Now for the surprise ! I am SO impressed with this model, the speed and ease of construction, that I have purchased a second kit from Sprue Brothers... The new one doesn't have the pewter Kobayashi figure though... That's OK, I can live with that.
So if you think you are seeing double, you're not. There are now Two of these wonderful kits on the bench. For those of you kind enough to read this far I have another surprise... I also picked up a 1/48 scale Hasegawa A6M-1 "prototype" Zero. This kit has the early engine and a two bladed propeller, along with the shorter fuselage that was changed prior to full scale production of the A6M... It very well might make it on the the bench soon as part of the EoJ group. Time will tell... 😉
This second Ki-61 Hien kit will most likely get completed and painted as a 68th Sentai machine, as flown from the Wewak, New Guinea area. It will be wearing the "squiggly" green lines randomly painted over the bare metal finish.
I still have to decide on which plane from the 68th Sentai I want to build it as.
Sergeant Susumu Kajinami comes to mind flying a Hien with the serial number "888". This is still not permanently decided however...but it is looking very good for now. 🙂
Please stay tuned for updates, and as always, comments are encouraged.
