Wow, WHAT AN ENTRY, my friend @wkubacki! Three Hasegawa Raidens built to your usual excellent standards! What more can we ask for?

Ihave always considered the Raiden an absolutely cool machine: built for speed. Your builds will definitely represent a great tribute to this important plane.

You went for a Silhouette Cameo 4! Looks to be a very good machine and it will be nice to see the results.

Looking forward to your super builds!

P.S. I have an Arii quarterscale Raiden to build for our amazing EoJ GB, I might borrow (ok, steal...) some of your techniques you are going to use on your builds.

Thanks for this great contribution to this equally great Empire of Japan Group Build!

Woody, @wkubacki
I like what you are doing here ! Building kits the way I do most of the time. I find it is easier to set up an assembly line and spray all the same colors at the same time. The same thing goes for building in this manner. The only drawback is that if you make a mistake during the building process, you have amplified it by the number of kits that you have started. So you must be very careful with this. Painting is not so critical, as you can always paint whatever it is you are working on again.

I will definitely be watching for updates. I have a 1/32 scale Hasegawa Raiden and several of the 1/48 Tamiya kits left to build, so I will tag along and follow your research.

The Hasegawa Raiden has had some little things completed, such as the tires and propeller blades have been painted.

Thanks for starting another project for the EoJ.

So it’s been a while since my last post. I’ve come to realize that building three planes at once is probably too much handle, but I’m going to push through. Initially I was building the cockpits all together but I realized that just led to me getting confused, so I decided to work on one cockpit at a time and complete it and then move in to the next one.

Upon initial glance, the Hasegawa kit has pretty good details, but as I started looking more and more at my references I realized they got a few things wrong:

The dials at the rear of the left console are actually oxygen bottles.

There is a lever between the left hand console and seat that is missing. Not sure what it is for.

The rudder pedals should be solid

None of these errors detract too much from the kit, but as the cockpit is the largest of all Japanese fighter planes, I decided to rectify most of them. I have an Eduard PE set that I will used for the J2M5. Honestly, I am not used to working with PE, and I think at 1/48 it is very finicky.

Missing bungee chord for the seat.
The way the seat attaches the floor is simplified, there should be members coming off the rear bulkhead and supporting the seat (much like the Zero).

The handle for the emergency landing gear retraction system is moulded onto the pump (to the right of the seat), but it should be shown in its stowed position just aft of the right side of the instrument panel.

The radio is incorrect as far as I can tell. It’s far too small, and looks to replicate what’s in the last remaining J2M3. My sources and the 1/32 J2M3 by Hasegawa (which I have and have been using as a reference) has the larger radio.

Here you can see the difference in size of the radios between the 1/48 and 1/32 kit. In my Tamiya J2M3 build (check my profile for the article) I scratch built the radio. This time I have two options: 1. Scratch build it and attempt to use my Cameo 4 to cut the styrene, or 2. Draft the radio and send it to my friend with a 3D printer to polish the design and print it. I’m leaning towards option 2, although option 1 would be great practice to see what the Cameo is capable of. I’ll hold off on the radio until later in the build.

Next I wired up the sidewalls and added a wire from the radio box on the right hand side with a plug drilled from 0.020” styrene rod. Adding the rod really does give it a bit more realistic appearance.

Next the parts were primed with Mr Surfacer 1500 black (although I should really use up my grey 1500) then the floor was painted silver in the locations I wanted to chip it. Then Treaemme HS and AK RC 306 Mitsubishi interior green and then chipped with a stiff brush. I painted the radio consoles and junction boxes dark green (AK RC 304 D1 Nakajima Dark Green). Next up the IP decal was added and heavily doused in Tamiya Mark Fit Strong.

Then a wash of Tamiya panel liner and Mr Weathering Color Stain Brown WC03.
All that is left is adding the belts, bungee, and a quick spray with GX113 Flat clear.

I’ll be moving onto the next cockpit tonight , but I won’t bore you with the details of that build as they will be the same. Hopefully in a weeks time I’ll report back with pictures of all three completed cockpits

15 attached images. Click to enlarge.

Little progress report, all the cockpits are complete and glued together. Next step is to take a good look at how the fuselages all fit together with the upper decking to reduce filling and sanding. I've also decided to create a 3D model of the Raiden radio instead of farming it out to my friend. I downloaded Fusion 360 for free and spent the next few hours learning how to use it. It's not perfect but at 1/48 scale I don't think it will make too much of a difference and it will be a great improvement on the kit's radio.

2 attached images. Click to enlarge.

Thanks SPiros @fiveten. if i had more skill and if it was for a larger scale I would add the small placards and add more texture to the dials. I do have the 1/32 kit so maybe I will improve this design and use it on that.

Next I glued on the upper fuselage decking. One bit of detail here is that the access panels for the oil reservoir and the rear engine accessories are split by the decking piece and need to have the seam filled as they are single pieces, but not symmetrical left and right sides. This is not obvious as the anti glare paint runs directly along this area in question, making it appear that the access panels are two pieces.

Moving on to the forward cowl, there is a plate that is attached to the cowl lip by two braces at the 6 and 9 o'clock positions. Behind this plate goes the engine cooling fan which then is glued onto another fan related piece. When assembled, the cowling plate did not rest equally proud of the cowling lip. I added a thin sheet of styrene behind the plate and this solved that issue, although next time I will add the sheet behind the fan so it's not as noticeable. This area needed a bit of cleaning up with the scraper and sandpaper. This will all be painted aluminum as reference photos show this was all left in bare metal.

Then I glued on the forward cowl, and this took a bit of fiddling as the cowl didn't fit perfectly, and needed a fair bit of sanding and restoring of panel lines and fasteners.

19 attached images. Click to enlarge.