As always, a busy week. But I have got my head down and got the majority done on the Shinden, well, in fact it's all done other than final assemblies.
The Smaller Assemblies
From the last post I still had some small parts to sort out, starting with the canopy. These were masked with lots of small pieces of tamiya tape and has thoroughly reaffirmed my belief that pre-cut masks are always a must have purchase for me. Regardless, I painted them the same way I normally do. First with the interior colour, then with the exterior. I then remembered the front windscreen was bare-metal so went back over it with some aluminium paint. As another divergence from the source material, if you look closely you can see the photographs depict the aircraft without any canopy glass but naturally I was unwilling to attempt to remove the glass on these pieces. The kit comes with a single piece closed canopy or a three piece one for opened, I went for the three piece and will leave the sliding canopy unglued.
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Next was that mighty six-bladed propeller, this was simply done by spraying the propeller yellow, masking off the tips, and painting the rest in a brown. I used Tamiya's XF-10 for this, which is curiously more red than their XF-64 Red Brown. The two pieces for the spinner were painted green, and given a tiny bit of chipping with some paint and some sponge, before all being assembled.
The undercarriage also recieved its doors, these were weathered with Tamiya panel liner before being glued on.
And finally the flaps were painted. Now, sometime a piece decides to jump off into the void and one of the smaller flap pieces did just this. Normally a quick look finds the missing piece, unfortunately despite quite literally the biggest search and rescue effort for a piece of plastic I've ever done I still couldn't find the thing, so I had to scratchbuild a replacement out of some thin plasti-card.
Weathering the Shinden
First of all it was time to utilise the chipping fluid, with water a cocktail stick and some tweezers I got scratching away and largely followed what could be seen in photos. Some panels were barely touched, a lot of panels had chippings across the panel lines, a couple panels were completely weathered, there is a large variety on offer in the photos and where I can't see I tried my best to replicate something interesting.
After this I gave the model a FloryModels dark dirt wash, a year ago I'd swear by this product but the last few kits have highlighted how hard it is to get rid off all of it from the nooks and crannies of a kit. I still think it's good, and wanting to go for a dusty finish I thought any leftovers weren't a bad thing. Unfortunately the wash didn't adhere very well to the undersides, so here I used some more Tamiya Panel Liner which worked quite nicely.
Finally I did some oil work, not a lot mind you but enough to try and create some more variation. Again, I wanted a bit of a dusty look but not go so far it looked like my Corsair that was covered in dust and sand.
The final steps are just to glue everything together. Undercarriage, doors, canopy, and also to paint some parts like the gun barrels. I've decided to add the pitot tube and antenna wires, the aircraft is missing these in the photograph but I figure if I've added the guns then adding some interesting looking antennas can't do any more harm.
Seeing it like this really highlights the shape of the Shinden, it's such a sleek design that I can't help but feel a bit of regret for not doing it wheels up in flight, I suppose there is always a chance of doing the Hasegawa kit on a stick someday.
1 additional image. Click to enlarge.
