1/48 Hasegawa Ki-84 Hayate

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Thanks for the comments guys! Plodding along here. Things are taking longer because I'm doing things I used to skip over or accept as is. I think that's a good thing but it definitely slows my progress down. Here are a couple of examples.

Ejector pin marks in hard to reach places or on small parts used to be ignored. These will be fairly visible so I will take care of them using my Dremel and some careful sanding.
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The kit has a headrest that comes in FOUR parts. Usually one piece would suffice for something like this but additional detail comes at a price. The seam line on the back of the head rest will most likely be obscured by the distortion of the clear canopy. But I can't ignore it and I've got some nice tools to help me fix this.
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I used my punch and die set to knock out little discs from a soda can. A few dabs of putty and it looks a lot cleaner no?
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Ejector pin marks on the front side of the landing gear struts. I would've left em alone if Hasegawa had the sense to put these on the trailing side but NOOOOO...
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Brake lines made of lead wire are added. The masking tape covers the shiny strut that has been finished in Alclad Chrome.
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Here is the landing gear bits and pieces painted and weathered. Yes, ejector pin marks on the main gear doors! I THINK these will be covered by the tires but if not... a little more work to do. These parts are stored away in a little baggy until later.
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The prop and spinner has been painted, chipped and weathered. I guess it is a little preview of what's to come on this Hayate!
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The engine is finished with a flat coat...
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Fit on this kit has been outstanding in most places. Here is the wing to fuselage fit... no putty here!
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Tail control surfaces match nicely to the tail...
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The only fit issue is here. You can't see if form this view but the wing portion it not level with the fuselage portion. This is going to require some shaving/puttying/sanding but hopefully it shouldn't be too difficult. Should I rescribe the panel line and put back the rivets? Perhaps.
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Thanks for the comments! I'm making some progress on the Hayate. The canopy was masked using Montex masks. I've had issues with Montex canopy masks lifting off of curved surfaces so I was extra careful in not touching the adhesive side of the masks with my fingertips and using a wooden toothpick as an applicator. But despite that care, the masks lifted anyway. If tamped down, the lifted edges will stay down for about 10-20 seconds... enough to get a coat of paint on.

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I didn't like the idea of constantly having to monitor the mask edges through multiple paint and clear coats so I decided to cut new masks using Tamiya tape. I simply peeled off the Montex masks, stuck them on pieces of Tamiya tape and used the masks as cutting stencils for new masks.

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With that taken care of, I could move on to painting. I've decided to use the hairspray method for the paint chipping. This involves painting a metallic finish as a base coat so I as a base coat for the base coat, I primed the entire plane in Tamiya Black.

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BTW... for this build, I've switched from a Paasche V airbrush to a new Iwata HP-C Plus. I'm still getting accustomed to the new brush but overall, I am very impressed with the Iwata and I think it will be my primary brush from now on. The biggest difference between the two brushes is the paint feed system... the Paasche is a side feed with a detachable paint cup while the Iwata is a gravity fed with an integral paint cup on top. The spray from the Iwata seems to be atomized in a finer grade but on the debit side, it seems to be more finicky in terms of thinner/paint ratio... it spits more than the Paasche when the paint is not thinned enough.

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After the black, a coat of Alclad Aircraft Aluminum is applied. I don't have a definite game plan when it comes to chipping on this aircraft so I decided to metalize the entire plane and worry about it later. That's one advantage I've found that the hairspray method has over salt chipping.
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Hairspray is applied over the entire aircraft. I stole my wife's aerosol hairsrpay so this is decanted into a small cup and sprayed through my airbrush. Once that is dry, the panel lines are preshaded in black (forgot to take a picture of that). The grey undersides comes next.

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The aircraft I will be depicting is a Ki-84 from the 57th Shibu Tai. Once the grey dries, I will mask off the bottom and paint the upper camo colors.

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Wonderful work that you carry so far John. :shock:
Taking notes to take account of. Very interesting painting process, I will be pending as you do. I want to know well the technique of hairspray so that it can practice in my future birds.

Felicidades y saludos cordiales :thumbup:

SANCER
 
Thanks for the comments everyone!

Wonderful work that you carry so far John. :shock:
Taking notes to take account of. Very interesting painting process, I will be pending as you do. I want to know well the technique of hairspray so that it can practice in my future birds.

Felicidades y saludos cordiales :thumbup:

SANCER

Thank you Sancer! I'm not an expert at this hairspray method. I've got some decent results using it but have also experienced some inconsistency. I prefer it to the salt method for a few reasons. One is the effect itself, which is quite realistic and much finer than can be achieved with salt. The other is flexibility. With the salt method, the salt crystals determine where the chipping occurs. It's a bit difficult to visualize (at least for me) what the chipping is going to look like but once you lay the salt down, you're stuck with the results. The hairspray method allows you to build up the effect gradually. You can work on it, set it down and come back later and chip some more if necessary.

Back to the Hayate. Before chipping, I highlighted some panels with lighter shades of the main grey/brown colors. Just to give the single color a bit more depth.

Here is the underside...
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Yellow ID panels added to the front of the wings...
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The main idea behind the hairspray method is the creation of an unstable, water-soluble layer between the metallic finish and outer color using hairspray. The application of water combined with gentle brush action dissolves the hairspray and the outer color will begin to disintegrate in tiny pieces revealing the metallic finish in a (hopefully) realistic fashion. Because of circumstance, the primary chipping work on my Hayate was delayed to two days after the outer colors were applied. I was curious to see how that would affect the chipping procedure since the outer acrylic coat would be fully cured.

Using a small paintbrush dipped in water, I picked a small area underneath the canopy on the port side and started brushing. Brush brush brush... rub rub rub. Nothing. After a good five minutes of increasingly vigorous brushing, I could see no chipping! A few thoughts ran through my head at this point. (1) Is the Gunze-Sangyo paint that I used for the upper brown color somehow impervious to the hairspray method? (2) Do you need to perform hairspray chipping BEFORE the paint fully cures? Dismayed, I wiped off the water to regroup. That's when I realized that there was a very subtle chipping effect in that area that was difficult to see when the surface was wet. Whatever the cause(s), paint chipping WAS possible but it took a very long time, spread out over three sessions.

Initial effort... can you see the very slight chipping under the masked cockpit opening?
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Another session on the starboard side...
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More progressive chipping... despite the level of effort expended (or maybe BECAUSE OF IT), the chipping effect is finer and more limited in scale than I originally intended. The chipping on the yellow ID bands was most difficult since it was over an additional coat of paint. My poor paintbrush now looks like an angry porcupine.
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I'm guessing that it would be near impossible to chip the hinomarus (which will be made of two separate layers of white and red paint) so any chipping there will have to be using another method.

Final note for this entry... the Alclad finish on the bottom of the plane was totally useless... I forgot to spray the bottom with hairspray!
 

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