1/48 Hasegawa Ki-100 Fighter

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Weizenbrot

Airman
30
52
Jan 12, 2023
Hi all, how is everything going these days? It has been almost half a year since my last aircraft model. This time please let me introduce you my most recent work Hasegawa's Ki-100 in 48th scale.

I started this work during the COVID pandemic. My idea was to simulate the stressed skin with help of sanding tool and real copper skins. The other reason was it really is a good way to kill time when work from home. I moved to a new flat recently and have a separate room for my workshop, so I decided to finish this work.

Before start, please give me some time to have a quick review of the kit. This kit was from 1990s. Hasegawa modified it from their older Ki-61. You can tell from the sprue, as it has many parts for Ki-61. Although this is not a new model, it is pretty sharp. Panel lines are clear, details are fine. The fitting is not as good as Tamiya, but you can still simply fix it with putty. Overall old Hasegawa did professional job on this aircraft.

Let's now move to the workshop. As usual, I went through all the panel lines and made all the rivets referring to a book.

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With the rivet lines as a reference, I started to make the stressed skin effects. First I used a 10mm sanding head to roughly sand down a light groove. Then I turned to a smaller 4mm head to deepen some area there are usually more "buckling". I kept checking pictures of real aircrafts to understand the relationship between two panels (are they overlapped or bridged?) and make sure the skin looks nature.

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After sanding with the tool. I used #400 sanding paper to smooth the edges of each skin "lattice". Trimmed until satisfied, I used 3M green sanding foam to finally remove scratches caused by previous steps.

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I will be back tomorrow to update other metal work and cockpit modification.
 
Thank you guys!

I decided to do minor modifications on the engine and cockpit interiors. So only some wires and seat belts were added. I also added the rear parts of fuselage cannons which were missed in the kit. Please note that there are some differences between details of cockpits of Ki-61 and Ki-100. There might be something not accurate for this work.
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After assembling of left and right pieces of fuselage, I notices that skins around all the heat-exchanger inlets are too thick, so I decided to remake them with 0.1 mm copper foils.
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Similar work was done with landing gear covers.
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Hasegawa provided a pair of main landing gears with very nice details. I did some minor changes especially the absorber which was in Ki-61 specification.
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Some other modifications include the actuator rods of ruder and rivets added to the dropping fuel tanks. A funny fact is that the late war Japanese dropping tank were sometimes made from Bamboo or wood.
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I think that's all for today. Tomorrow I will start with the painting job.
 
Thank you guys!

So continue with the paint work. I used Mr.Hobby's black primer as base, it can give the following metal surface painting a sort of matte effect which is closer to the situation on real aircrafts(I read on a book that the lower surfaces is usually not bare metal, they were usually painted with silver protection paint). Then I applied some liquid mask on the area that frequently touched by pilots and maintenance crews.
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After painting the upper surface with Kawasaki Green, I added some "fake" highlight and shadow to emphasis light contrast of the skin. I kept adjusting it until it looks nature. You can tell the delicate difference between starboard and port side wings in the following picture.
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In concerning if the decal will fit well with the uneven surfaces, I used masks instead of decals for most of the insignias and signs except the small ones and the insignia of Akeno Flight School.
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It's almost done! Tomorrow I will post the final part of finished model.
 
I applied some chipping and dust on the area always stepped and touched by pilots and maintenance crews. After finishing exhaust markings, I added some oil stains around refueling hatches and on the skins near fuel tanks. Finally I adjusted the tone with some oil paints. And so… here is the finished model.
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I took these two pictures during sunset as well.
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I hope you enjoyed this model. And please let me know your thought!
 

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