Ki-84 Hayate (Frank)

by Andreas Beck

 Hasegawa's 1/48 scale Ki-84 Frank is available online from Squadron.com

Here is Hasegawa's 1/48 scale Ki-84 Hayate built straight from the box.

This beautiful Hasegawa kit resulted from some frustrations with one of those kits which should have been delivered simply with a good scale drawing, a sharp modeling knife and a piece of soap thus avoiding a lot of work. Hasegawa`s Japanese WW II kits are always good as a little in between fun during a long line of difficult projects. No after-market additions were adopted, just the pitot tube is made out of injection needles.

As I am no Japanese expert (and I don´t want to become) all colors are estimated. Coloring had the following steps: Priming with Revell Flat Black (recessed lines etc) and Hu 147 for lower and HU 149 for upper surfaces. The final coat was applied with several thin coats of Schmincke artist airbrush colors. These have extremely fine pigments and they are water-based, fast drying and leave no stinking track in the modeler's workshop. The Hinomarus are from AMD.

The Aotake was done with the old Tamiya X-11 (enamel in the square bottles, an extremely good conventional silver - but hard to get) as a basis oversprayed with a thin layer of Schmincke Turquoise. To my regret the tone comes out far to bright.

I must admit I do not have any idea if the Green is realistic. To my eyes the result looks quite okay.. To give a reference, the prop blade color is nearly 100% FS 24097. In fact there is no real plane I tried to copy. This model should just look like a Frank as it might have been.

The photo-background is from the former Soviet Air Force base Brand, 30 km SE of Berlin.

Click the thumbnails below to view larger images:

Model, Images and Text Copyright © 2003 by Andreas Beck
Page Created 01 May, 2003
Last Updated 25 March, 2004

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