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Kit
No: 1663 Decal options: 2 Rating: 9/10 Comments: A beautiful little kit with an impressive array or stores options, good fit, excellent detail. |
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DML
- 1/72 Ki61-1 Hien (Tony)
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| With more than a passing resemblance to the Heinkel 100,
the Kawasaki Ki61 owes its lineage to the Luftwaffe's 'phantom' fighter
in many ways - Japan acquired licenses to build the He 100 and its power
plant, the Daimler DB601, the influence of which culminated in the Hien
(Tony), an effective fighter aircraft that caused the allies more than
a little concern. The arrival of DML's new 1/72 Ki61 gave me a little concern too - my last encounter with a 1/72 Dragon kit was their P-61A Black Widow (see PKC 42) and was not an experienced I wished to repeat. And having built, and hugely enjoyed, several of DML's 1/48 aircraft and 1/35 armour kits, I had began to wonder if their 1/72 models had started to lag behind. Enter the Hien, DML's first foray into Japanese aircraft territory. The box features attractive Sataki artwork of Ki61 diving into a stream of B-29's. Inside, the parts-count is low, spread across one box-fitting sprue. Moulded in light grey with recessed panel detail, the kit is generally up to the high standards maintained by Dragon but one or two of the smaller parts in my sample were crude. The cockpit features nice sidewall detail, seat, stick and floor, though the instrument panel in my sample was just a blob of shiny plastic - the instructions give explicit painting information, but there was no moulded dials or even a decal for the details. The one-piece canopy is very thin and the frame lines lightly marked - cutting this one open to display the interior could be too much for the fragile plastic, so it may be better to use a vac-form alternative. The wing breakdown is unusual. DML have moulded all the control surfaces and trailing edges integrally on the full-span lower wing - the reverse of how its usually done. The result isn't any worse for it, the trailing edges are sharp and the upper wing sections drop into place with no trouble. Construction was swift, aided by the small number of parts and the generally good component fit. I gently sanded the mating surfaces between the wing foot and the fuselage to ensure a better fit. I was still left with a slight gap on the port side which I filled with super glue, the excess being removed with a cotton bud soak in debonder, before a final pass with accelerator. The Ki61's flat belly also needed attention, more so as the mating surfaces slightly bowed inwards. The top of the engine cowling is sensibly moulded as a separate piece, but on my sample the edges overhung the fuselage a little. I found that a little gentle sanding blended it into the airframe contours with no need for filler. DML's rendering of the Sumitomo propeller is finely moulded, but at the price of some heavy flow gates. I used a pair of sprue cutters to carefully remove the prop and cleaned up the scars with a flexi-pad. The kit offers the choice between weighted and unweighed tyres. External stores consists of two drop tanks and a pair of pylons to mount them on. The decals sheet has options for two Tony's, both machines are natural metal with green mottle. One is from the 244th Sentai, captained by Teruhiko Kobayashi, which features a red fin and a blue striped down the fuselage. The other is a little more unusual, a Chinese nationalist aircraft from the 18th Fighter Squadron. The sheet provides plenty of stencil data and markings for the Japanese Tony, the decals for the Chinese option are confined to just six national insignia and a blue tail band - other Tony schemes are available from a wide source of specialist decals. I opted for the Chinese Hien and turned to Humbrol's Polished Aluminium for the metal finish. The rest of the colours were the Gunze Sangyo acrylics recommended on the instruction sheet. The decals in my sample were well printed, separated cleanly from the backing sheet and bedded down well over the recessed detail. The final sheen was Satincote, light dusted on. The model measures up well, except for the fuselage which appears to be about 5mm too short - I had a Hasegawa 1:48 Tony to hand which did scale out perfectly against most published data. Never the less, I enjoyed DML's Kawasaki Hien, it has good detail and is relatively easy to build. |
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