Nakajima Ki-27 Otsu 'Nate' - Hasegawa 1/72

[sroubos]

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!

[Val]

Nice work

[JOAN]

nice and stylish build !

lovely model.

olivier

[Les Moore]

Clean...simple...to the point...love it!!

[Billydick]

Nice build Sroubos :-) Interestingly Hase have released a Nakajima Ki43 Oscar in 1/48 a new tooling. I really think the Japanese fighters are worth building.

BillyD

[Skyraider3D]

I only now discover this thread. Very nice model Sander!

Here is a profile of this aircraft, as featured in Osprey's Ki-27 'Nate' Aces by Nicholas Millman, for which I produced all illustrations.

[Mark4700]

Very nice clean build.