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Hello guys, this is my currently the last completed model. It's an old Hasegawa model. Here's the picture, enjoy it.

Hasegawa's (actually Mania's) Ki-27 must be almost as old as the original plane by now. It's still a nice kit though, like most Mania re-issues (I'm a fan of their Kate). My boxing is from the early 80s and was missing the decals, but this was not a problem on this build. This is a companion build to my earlier Dutch East Indies MLD PBY-5 Catalina, report here. Catalina Y-63 was commanded by my great-uncle Willem Ditmar, and I found out that a number of Ki-27s were likely responsible for shooting it down. A perfect excuse to build one! I received a lot of useful information from Nick Millman and Ronnie Olsthoorn, who were kind enough to share some profiles from Nick's recent book 'Ki-27 Nate Aces' with me. The most likely candidate was the camouflaged Nate flown by Lt. Yutaka Aoyagi of the 12th Air Brigade, 11th Sentai, so this is the one I settled on. As stated, the kit is still quite nice, but showing its age. Panel lines on the fuselage are recessed, but raised on the wing. There was quite a bit of flash on the smaller parts, even though this is an older boxing. A number of optional parts are included for the gear, but I've never seen a Hasegawa boxing using these. An optional rear canopy is also included. There are really not that many parts to it though, about 25 in all. Cockpit is very bare, I added some tape seat belts. I didn't have any decals in this kit but since I got the recent combi-release of this kit by Hasegawa cheaply a few weeks back, I was hoping to use some of the decals from that. Alas, all the markings on Aoyagi's aircraft were unique so I masked everything, including the hinomarus. Ronnie's profile was resized and used as a guide to cut out the masks. I started by spraying the whole plane with white Tamiya primer to do both the white areas and allow good coverage of the red and yellow. This was followed by masking off the white, then spraying the red, masking, yellow, masking, IJA grey and IJA green. I'm pleased with the results, for such simple markings spraying isn't all that much more work than using decals. I did use the stencils from Hasegawa's new decal sheet. After decalling I used some MiG dark wash to highlight the control surfaces, followed by the bits and bobs and some EZ wire for the antenna. I then applied some matt varnish to finish it all. Disaster struck when removing the masking from the canopy, some of the white primer had run under the tape I'm not too happy about it so I may repaint the canopy when I get back to the kit some time in the future (this is a joke). All in all a nice, easy build. My thanks to Nick and Ronnie for their help on getting the color scheme right and providing some interesting background information. I'm looking forward to reuniting the Nate and the Catalina after 72 years. I need to ferry Nate across the English Channel to my parents' place though, but I will post some pics of this reunion!

Hi, Another vintage model from my shelvs, Ki-27b by Hasegawa. I made this model about 1976. Then, in early 80-ties a catastrophy happend - a glass shelf above it collapsed and this was the worst devastated model: broken u/c leg, canopy, even wing etc.... It underwent immediately rapair including new canopy...- BTW the repair was done by my brother since it happend when my collection was in his house for some almost eight dark years when I was not doing models and he informed me about whole accident already after he repaired... Then, sometime in 1990 I made some weathering upgrading model to style of finishing. Recently I cleaned it from dust and made some small tuning mostly with hinomarus which were in bad condition. I added Vallejo matt cover finally. The painting scheme is of machine of 2 Sq., 246 group JAAF, Homeland defence 1942-3, I followed profile published in book: Munson, K.; "Fighters, attack and training aircraft 1939-45," Blandford, 1969. NB this book and whole Blandford series was a "bible" for my brother and me these years... Comments welcome and regards Jerzy-Wojtek

This is the ICM 1/72 Nakajima Ki-27b 'Nate' built for the Less Than a Tenner Group Build, painted to represent the aircraft of Lieutentant Hyoe Yonage, 24th Sentai 2 Chutai, stationed at either the Philippines or China in December 1941: The kit was built out of the box but the decals used were from a Print Scale sheet on the Ki-27. This particular camouflage scheme was available as part of the kit decals, but they were not very good. The kit was painted with Humbrol and Revell enamels, and Lifecolor Acrylics. The three-colour scheme for the Nate, especially the indigo caught my eye and chose the colours based on this blog post by Nick Millman: http://www.aviationo...sen-part-7.html Consensus holds this kit to be the most accurate Nate in outline, with fine-too fine for a brush-painter like me-surface detail and some unusual engineering choices for assembly. These can be best characterized as 'interesting' and must have worked like a dream for the first release of the kit. Here it is compared to a 1/144 model of the same subject from FE Resin I built last year: For the record, the kit cost me 6 pounds 50 from Hannants. More information on the build (and what I thought of some of the engineering choices) can be found on the progress thread here: http://www.britmodeller.com/forums/index.php?/topic/234955850-icm-172-ki-27-finished/ Thanks for looking! Comments are welcome.

Build 5 I love 1/144, but it's sometimes hard to find unusual subjects in this scale without resorting to expensive resin or poor quality short run injection kits. So occasionally (when I find a bargain) I pick up the odd F-Toys, J-Wings or Cafereo models. These models come ready painted and usually have some of the marking already applied. Luckily this one has a full decal sheet and no markings, which saves me having to scavenge through the spares box. It's going to get a full paint strip, clean up of parts, rebuild and spray job. So with the exception of stripping it, it just like building a normal kit. Price: 99p from eBay.