**** DONE: 1/48 Ki-45 Toryu Kai Tei - Night War of WWII

[Crimea_River]

re: "Tamiya lacquer thinner" - save your money and buy yourself a gallon of generic lacquer thinner at Home Depot for 15 bucks. It's also great for cleaning dried paint off any surface including the metal parts of your air brush.

 

[JKim]

re: "Tamiya lacquer thinner" - save your money and buy yourself a gallon of generic lacquer thinner at Home Depot for 15 bucks. It's also great for cleaning dried paint off any surface including the metal parts of your air brush.

Yup! I do have a tin of lacquer thinner from Home Depot. Also acetone for certain things (being careful with that since it can eat into lots of materials including plastic). The Tamiya lacquer thinner is indeed too expensive to use as a cleaner but it's a good thinner for certain products including Mr Surfacer 1000 and even Tamiya acrylic paints. I've used it to lay down Tamiya Gloss Black in a thick coat... worked better than iso alcohol for that application.

Back to the Toryu... here's the nose joint filled in with White Milliput. You can use water to clean off any excess... it's great for filling gaps in tight places without having to sand.

I need to work on the landing gear next. The tail wheel and strut is molded together but well defined and looks good after careful painting. I added the hydraulic line with the fitting coming from the end of a 1/48 machine gun from the spares box.

The tires and hubs are molded separately, making masks unnecessary. The tires have subtle treads on them. Too shallow to get a pastel wash to stick so I decided to something different and mask some "wear". The tires were painted in a grey/black mixture that was a tad lighter than my normal rubber tire color. Three thin tread lines were masked.

The tires were then sprayed with a darker grey.

The various landing gear struts were painted and given a pastel wash. Looking at the pictures... I may try to blend the lighter grey into the darker grey on the outer edge of the tires to reduce the stripe effect.

The landing gear doors have been painted and given a wash. You can barely make out the marbled pre-shading on the outer side of the doors... you'll see much more of this when I paint the main camo!

 

[Rogi]

Beautiful progress so far

 

[Wurger]

 

[JKim]

Thanks guys! I am planning to use Tamiya XF-13 JA Green and XF-14 JA Grey as the baseline for my camo colors. Are these considered accurate?

 

[rochie]

John, masking tyre wear is just plain showing off i reckon !

Looks great

 

[JKim]

Never buy upgrade kits John, even when they have come in the box a la Eduard i rarely use them !

I think last year, my response would've been "Why not use them?" But having put some kits under my belt and using a few resin and photoetched upgrades from different manufacturers over the past year, I can understand the choice to avoid upgrades. At first blush, they seem have clear advantages over kit parts in many cases but the cost and the effort to actually utilize them often leaves you wondering, "was it worth it?" I bought a full upgrade set from Alley Cat for my 109G-10 build that went woefully underutilized due to the poor fit of many of bigger pieces including the prop spinner, the gun cowling and the upper wing panels. Resin, even though it is capable of superb detail, seems to be a rather inconsistent medium and quality varies from manufacturer to manufacturer or even batch to batch. The same thing applies to the photoetched stuff. It looks great on the fret but there are inherent drawbacks to PE, most notably the flatness of it. The sandwich composition of instrument panels help give IP's some 3D relief but most PE sets restrict that approach to the IP's only and not the sidewalls, radio units and other panels and often those looks a bit unrealistic due to the lack of depth. So yeah, I think I understand where you are coming from Karl. The good thing is that the Toryu is more than adequate without the CMK upgrades that I bought. Some of the kit parts are actually more detailed (i.e. parachute shelf) than the resin upgrades.

John, masking tyre wear is just plain showing off i reckon !

Looks great

Thanks! Just something I thought I'd try since tires are almost always exhibiting some type of wear on them. Not completely happy with the results so I'll take a closer look to see if I can do some microscopic-level blending of the outside transitions.

 

[Airframes]

Very nice work John.
Regarding the tyres, personally, I'd leave the tread area as it is, but add wear, or dirt, to the shoulders, using a slightly lighter grey/black, with a touch of dust - concrete, sand, earth whatever - in a thin, soft ring around the periphery of each side of each tyre. This will give more of a '3D' look, and take the focus away from the tread, the whole blending visually into a pleasing and realistic appearance.

 

[JKim]

That's my plan... to just soften the transition on the shoulders of the tires only and leaving the rest of the tread alone. The tread pattern is pretty subtle... I've cranked up the brightness/contrast in the posted photos to show them off better.

 

[JKim]

A little bit of work on the pitot tube. I wanted to replace the kit part with some brass tubing. The tube has a mounting base that needs to utilized.

I cut the pitot from the base and then reshaped the base to accommodate the thinner brass tubing.

The tip of the reshaped base is snipped off and then a little mounting hole is drilled into the end to accommodate the new pitot tube.

This is what the new pitot tube looks mounted in place. It's just held by friction. I'm going to glue the base onto the leading edge of the wing but leave the pitot tube off until all the painting and weathering is done to prevent breakage.

 

[Crimea_River]

Superb work John. I have no idea on your colour question, Japanese subjects being "foreign" to me.

 

[JKim]

Worked on the Toryu some more after dinner. The pitot tube got painted and then put away.

The engine nacelles were glued into place. I need to check the seam and clean it up as necessary.

Got a new toy/tool to use! I got the compass cutter to make masks for the hinomarus in case the kit decals were unusable.

Dang, this thing is pretty sweet. I cranked out four masks out of frisket paper in a few minutes.

Last of the tiny lights gets drilled out and filled with paint. I got poked in the finger twice, once with the x-acto and once with the pin vise, getting this one finished.

I cut the wing spars from the kit cockpit tub and glued them into the fuselage to help ensure correct dihedral.

The masked canopies were given a base coat of the interior color.

The middle clear piece, which is mostly fuselage, is glued into place at this point so I can clean up the joint without the wings getting in the way.

I'll attach the windscreen too but first the gun sight goes in.

Found another use for the compass cutter. It allowed me to cut masks for the engine faces so that I can temporarily attach the engine cowlings (with white glue) for painting. After painting I can pop them off, put in the exhaust pipes and then glue them permanently into place.

Am I obsessed? I'm spending all of my free time in that darn garage.

 

[Wurger]

 

[rochie]

Looking better with every update John

 

[Airframes]

Good stuff John.
I have a compass cutter, but I find it awkward to use and get a good, clean cut, first time. I'll admit though, at least 50% of the problem is my stiff hands and wrists.

 

[Crimea_River]

Nice looking cutter. There were times that I wanted to cut very small circle masks and the tools I had would not do a good job. May have to look for a similar rig.

 

[T Bolt]

Some real nice work there John

 

[le_steph40]

real nice progress John

 

[fubar57]

Nicely done. I have a circle cutter like that as well but the minimum I can make is 1cm.



Geo

 

[Lucky13]