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Special Hobby Nakajima Ki-27 Nate


spitfire

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Well it was tempting to build another French subject but I again wanted something different, when Special Hobby fetched out the Nate I was intrigued but did not buy one, but when they fetched out the Malaya version with a Nate and a Buffalo on the box art, I was hooked, I already had a Buffalo in the stash so a Dogfight double was born. The earlier version of the Special Hobby Nate fed an interest in early WW2 Japanese aviation so I also bought the SH Claude, so that could be on the bench soon as well.

When I was building up the stash, references, and paint ready for retirement Japanese subjects were pretty simple, IJN, early all over light grey, later green uppers and grey bottoms, IJA green and grey, and they all had that strange metallic blue interiors and wheel wells, however things seem to have changed !

When I opened the kit box I also started a thread asking for help with the colours, luckily for me I got some great advice and information from Nick Millman (and from his Blog) however any mistakes using this information are all mine !

Here's the box art that made me buy it.

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and the contents, sprues first.

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Cheers

Dennis

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One thing I might not have mentioned and which is probably relevant to a model in this scale. The inner rectangle inside the upper of the two small panels just behind the engine flaps was a transparent window. It needs drilling out and glazing or painting to represent this.

Looking forward to seeing your build.

Andy, the "purple" was indigo blue. The original tri-colour camouflage spec for the Ki-27 was "tawny" (khaki), green and indigo blue which sometimes appears in profiles as a dark blueish-green.

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Hi Nick I will look out for the transparent window, however I am a bit further along than my first post shows (I cheat by saving up build photos), as to the colour scheme Andy I am not sure yet, I like the box art scheme but Nick has planted it in my head that it was a 3 colour scheme, I have the colours but not a complete profile showing the pattern, so it could be as per the box art or a 3 colour scheme.

Cheers

Dennis

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The kit is a very strange mixture, it is a typical short run kit, there is some nice and not so nice resin, there is a nice PE set, there are no locating lugs, fit of parts is definately not in the Hasegawa league, but surface detail is very nice. The kit instructions are very confusing so I had to use some colour coding, sprues A, B, C, D and E parts were all highlighted with different colours on the instruction sheets and identified on the sprue diagrams as to what they were.

The engine bulkhead was a strange shape and a poor fit so I fitted a backing disc and placed some plastic strip inside the fuselage halves.

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The rest of the parts were cut from their sprues, cleaned up and stuck on plastic labels with either BluTac or reversed Tamiya tape ready for painting.

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Cheers

Dennis

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Looking foward to your finish, in true style with the rising sun aircraft..................................Heavy weathering please!!!!!

Photographs of both camouflaged subjects reveal that neither was particularly heavily weathered. Unsurprising since it was during the first months of the Japanese offensive and the camouflage was painted over the carefully applied factory finish which used good quality lacquers.

But don't let that stop you. Some modellers make dragons, goblins and elves too.

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Time for some paint, using Nicks formula for the interior colour produced some startling results, the mix is 50:50 Humbrol 88 Matt deck green and 104 Oxford blue, the resultant colour was quite a surprise.

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The resin rudder pedals were a bit flimsy so I made up some from plastic card and rod.

All the little parts were then painted, for some reason my Humbrol 85 (satin black) did not want to dry despite being stirred for 3 minutes with my battery stirrer, it did dry eventually but it took days.

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Here's the rather basic engine, at the start of it's journey.

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Cheers

Dennis

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Now for one of my favourite bits, the instrument panel, however there are not many cockpit photos out there of Ki-27 cockpits, however I found some nice photos of the one and only airframe at the Tachiarai Peace Memorial Museum and the IP was visible, for instrument faces I used the MDC decals and a bit of imagination !

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Cheers

Dennis

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Just come back from Christmas shopping in Chester, not too crazy yet, back to the engine, it comes without push rod tubes so you have to make them from plastic rod, here's the production line.

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And drilling the crankcase to accept them

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The photos of the Ki-27 recovered from the seabed show the cylinders to be rusty, this I assumed meant that they were cast and the cylinder heads (which were not rusty) to be aluminium, in which case following old Motorbike practice the barrels would be painted, I chose to paint them black to add a bit more "interest" to the engine.

Strangely for the aluminium I used Humbrol Polished Steel as the aluminium paint was too bright, I like it anyway. I also added some HT leads with fuse wire.

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Cheers

Dennis

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Those Airscale decals look the business in 1/32 Dennis - very nice. I use them in my 1/48 builds but, to me, the jury is still out as to whether I will bother in the future as they are fiddly and I am not sure how much you can reeally see in that scale.

The rest of your build is coming together!

Andy

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And nearly up to date, here's the pre cockpit closing photos.

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And it's pretty amazing what you miss until you take a look at a photograph, I will have to touch up the oil cooler paintwork after looking at this one, I also was a bit puzzled at first as where the machine gun barrels where given that they are at the front of the cockpit floor, the answer is that the gun muzzles are between the engine cylinders, which seem a bit odd to me.

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Next up came the wings, these were carefully glued together (no locating tabs) and the seams cleaned up, on the fuselage wing root there are these "bumps" to help locate the upper wing section

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When I offered up the wings to the fuselage this is what I found

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The top was not too bad, probably thanks to the "bumps" on the wing root.

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I was tempted to cut off the "bumps" but after some deep thought I changed my my mind and did this

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And it worked very well.

Cheers

Dennis

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Yes the fit is a bit challenging, even after reading a build over on Modelling Madness I was still amazed at the amount of material I had to remove from the cockpit floor to get it to fit and as mentioned in the build article the machine guns had to be moved inboard quite a but and the cocking handles fitted on the inside. Here's the link to the MM build.

http://www.modelingmadness.com/reviews/axis/j/jaaf/kop27.htm

Cheers

Dennis

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They are definately not boring, the other thing to take note of is the window in the fuselage side aft of the engine cowling as mentioned by Nick in an earlier post, looking at photos of Nate's its pretty prominent, but I was too far gone to do anything creative about it, cutting it out, thinning the fuselage sides, etc.

I will have to settle for painting it in a dark grey paint, it looks like there is a hatch with a small transparency just in the area of the machine guns, either to provide access from outside or to give the area some natural lighting in the area for the pilot (cocking handles).

Special Hobby have not missed it, it is present as engraved detail, see below.

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Cheers

Dennis

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it looks like there is a hatch with a small transparency just in the area of the machine guns, either to provide access from outside or to give the area some natural lighting in the area for the pilot (cocking handles).

Cheers

Dennis

Hi Dennis

In some references they are described as "gun loading inspection panels" but the window also provided light as the armourer had to get down on the floor of the cockpit under the instrument panel to load the belt feed and his own body then blocked the light through the cockpit opening. The guns were fed from two detachable magazines that were installed under the cockpit floor through the two rectangular spanwise panels under the wing immediately behind the cowling (so on a large scale model these panels would show wear from the regular handling and re-loading).

Regards

Nick

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Hi Dennis

In some references they are described as "gun loading inspection panels" but the window also provided light as the armourer had to get down on the floor of the cockpit under the instrument panel to load the belt feed and his own body then blocked the light through the cockpit opening. The guns were fed from two detachable magazines that were installed under the cockpit floor through the two rectangular spanwise panels under the wing immediately behind the cowling (so on a large scale model these panels would show wear from the regular handling and re-loading).

Regards

Nick

Thanks Nick, nice to know that I was on the right track at least.

Cheers

Dennis

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The window is indeed right by the guns, hadn't noticed it before. Pity about the wing/fuselage fit, but it's not insurmountable as can be seen by this fine example http://s362974870.onlinehome.us/forums/air...p;#entry2173111 great looking plane.

Yes I really liked that build, it just shows what can be done with these limited run kits, I'm certainly not complaining as they (SH, AZUR, PCM etc) are the only people who will build kits of these more exotic type of aircraft.

Cheers

Den

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