Search the Community

The Nakajima Ki-87 was another of the Japanese fighter designs that were intended to attack the B-29's flying over Japan, but never got off the ground (or indeed the drawing board) as Japan ran out of time, fuel, metal and pilots. It would have been a big aeroplane, with a 4 bladed propellor and a turbocharger on its radial engine, heavily armed, or at least proposed to be heavily armed - 2 20mm cannon in the wing roots, 2 30mm cannon outboard of the landing gear. Compared to the Ki-61 Tony and Ki-44 Tojo you can see how big this plane would have been. Here's the box lid - And the paint schemes provided. I decided to make mine in the captured scheme as shown, for a change from Hinomarus. Actually, this particular plane - a prototype - was almost certainly never captured in a flying condition, so it becomes another of RS models what ifs. It's a short run kit which has some fit issues - one of which I got so fed up sanding filling sanding etc I left it as it was, you can see where I tried to fill the gap with superglue. It also had parts on the sprues not mentioned in the instructions and parts mentioned in the instructions not present on the sprues! Weird, really weird. The box art shows the turbocharger casing in silver, but I forgot to do that, and left it in dark Iron. However, the majority of the kit fitted reasonably well, save the engine and cooling fan on the rear of the propellor which were very tight into the fuselage. The fan in particular needed reducing in width by cutting the fan blades back before it would fit. And the canopy didn't fit very well, sanding and shaving with a scalpel didn't help much, but enough to get it to sit in the right place. (Gaps filled with Glue n glaze) I used montex canopy masks which were not very good at all. I think my experience with them was enough to make sure I use Eduard, Peewit or dead design masks in future, which have all been excellent on other kits. Decals - went down pretty well, no complaints there, though they did take a while to slide off the backing paper. Painted with Mr Color and Tamiya paints, varnish matt galleria by Windsor & Newton A little Albion Alloys tube for the gun barrels and pitot, and a yahu instrument panet that you can't see. However, I know it's in there! Am I pleased with the model? Certainly pleased it's finished, a bit disappointed with the paint finish - I failed to thin the Mr Color Nakajima dark green paint and you can see that it was a bit thick on the kit via brush painting. Overall, I don't think this is a bad effort, certainly no major complaints about the kit, which is a refreshing change. Thanks for looking.

Slightly odd one here, This is something of a mule build of RS Models' Ki-87 prototype. The design really caught my eye, with pleasing lines and the turbo unceremoniously crammed in and sticking randomly out the side. The slender shape belies the size; this thing is about on par with a P-47 and looks ludicrously out of scale next to something like a Spitfire. The kit itself is nice; the detail parts are very basic, the frames and sprue gates are pretty messy and limited-runnish and the hand drawn instructions having a about the detail and precision to match the parts themselves. Still, I think RS have got the important stuff right; while I can't speak to the accuracy of the shape, the surface detail is fine (if a little simple) and canopy aside, the overall shape comes together quite nicely with a bit of care and cleanup. Overall quite enjoyable. The canopy needed a fair bit of reshaping, both inside the clear part and on the fuselage; and frankly still required rather more work than I ended up putting in. I hope you'll forgive a bit of drivel, I've been too lazy to document this stuff in a WIP. The build itself is rather rough I'm afraid. I used this really as a training model, trying out lots of things for the first time, and consequently didn't go to any great effort to get it perfect, nor to add detail. Really the plan was to learn to use metallics; mostly getting a good finish and then experimenting with ways to weather them, and break up that rather bland, sharp-edged look that you get once they're freshly applied. I wasn't particularly bothered about accuracy, really just playing with techniques that could just as easily go on sci-fi build or something. The various experiments were as follows: I had a first, rather lazy go at riveting the model (again in the hope of breaking up the metallics a bit). The work is pretty rough, nice to have the practice. Getting a good gloss layer for the metallics is always a work in progress. In this case I used black Mr finishing surfacer 1500, then sanded back with 1200-5000 grit to smooth the slightly rough plastic down (until speckly gray and black). Then glossed with Mr Color 002, polished a little, followed by Alclad Dark Aluminium and patches of stainless steel. I was pretty happy with the result. The good bit about this scheme, there was no need for any decals. The Antiglare, leading edges, Hinomarus and prop were masked, then got a protective Aquagloss; VMS chipping solution; Tamiya acrylic satined with X22. A bit of chipping and wearing, a bit of repairing, then all sealed again with aquagloss. I had a first go at shading panel edges and general dirt with Tamiya X19 smoke. This wasn't particularly successful, and since it comes out almost wet glossy, required those areas to be toned down again with VMS satin varnish, which affected the metal look somewhat. The overall look is a rather overblown attempt at shamelessly stealing this lovely brushed metal effect. I used very thinned brushed on Tamiya NATO black, but being Tamiya it's rather unforgiving and a lot of stripping and metallic repair work resulted. The brushed effect probably isn't very realistic, but (in the other model) I thought it looked really nice and added nice 'texture' to the metals. Mine turned out way over the top however, and the smaller scale probably didn't help. I'd try a more forgiving type of paint next time. I had a mess around using oils to highlight and shade panels in between rivets. It didn't work at all. In the end there's some finishing with tamiya powders, oil washes and other faffing around. Anyway sorry after all that spiel, this is what I ended up with: Anyway, fun experiment. Thanks for looking in. Andy

RS Models is to release 1/72 Nakajima Ki-87 kits - ref. 92211 - Nakajima Ki-87 Source: http://rsmodels.cz/cs/modely-letadel/plastikove-modely/1-72/92211/nakajima-ki-87 - ref.92212 - Nakajima Ki-87II Source: http://rsmodels.cz/cs/modely-letadel/plastikove-modely/1-72/92212/nakajima-ki-87-ii V.P.