Thanks gentlemen! Work on the Hayate is proceeding but I've been stuck on the cockpit for a few days. The SBS cockpit is very nice but with that detail comes the burden of painting it all and I'm just not very good at cockpit (read as "brush painting") work. So here is the fruit of a few days work on the Ki-84...
The cockpit set comes with a fair assortment of photo etched detail so I tried to attach as much of it as possible prior to painting. Some of the micro levers and switches were inadvertently pinged off into the abyss so I had to replace them with bits of stretch sprue.
The SBS instrument panel is a 3-piece affair with a resin panel, clear acetate for the instrument faces and a p.e. piece for the fascia. It looked decent but the instrument faces were barely visible even with the resin panel face painted white. So I handpainted the kit panel and liked the results a little bit better. Interestingly, the kit decal sheets provides TWO more options for the IP... instrument faces on a clear background and on a black background.
In the end, I stuck with my handpainted panel. The cockpit opening of the Ki-84 is quite small. You can see how the sidewalls curve inwards towards the top by looking at the shape of the bulkheads. So visibility into the cockpit will be limited. Outside of a few replacement levers, the only thing that I added was a wire on the control stick... the resin part had a molded line that was sanded off and replaced. I really like the gun sight that SBS provides. It is a three part assembly with a resin body, a petite photo etch piece on top and clear acetate for the sight glass.
Here are the painted resin sidewalls. I chose to go with a light green interior. I didn't want to use that metallic blue/green that is often seen in Japanese cockpit interiors and wheel wells. Just a personal preference... something about the metallic grain that seems to kill the scale effect, at least for me.
The SBS instructions would have you glue in the sidewalls into the fuselage sides first but I went the kit route and assembled the cockpit tub first and attached the subassembly whole into a fuselage side.
It took some jiggling to get the cockpit tub attached and the fuselage sides glued together. It's a tight fit but one benefit is that the cockpit tub acts as a spreader bar and will help the fit between the fuselage and wing roots. The jiggling was too much for the gun sight and it popped off during this stage. I put it away in a baggy for safe keeping... I will install this right before the windscreen goes on. I have to remember to be careful if I use CA glue to attach... don't want CA fumes to fog up the windscreen.
I can put the fuselage assembly aside for now and work on a few other things. The engine gets painted with Alclad aluminum.
Using a brush (ugh), I paint the crankcase gray and the ignition wire a metallic brown. The engine then gets a dirty wash of dark brown. Before assembly, I'll give the whole engine a flat coat.
While prefitting the engine assembly to front of the fuselage, I noticed that the cowling flaps are a bit thickish and would easily be sanded down.
Gentle scraping with an X-Acto knife gets the flaps down to a more realistic edge... a small touch but easy enough to do.
That's it for now!