1/32 Nakajima Ki-27 - 77th Sentai - Burma 1942

[Alex]

Compared to the journey so far, the fuselage closed up almost seamlessly, and I have it and the wing assembly fully cleaned up and almost ready for the inevitable battle to make them fit each other.  One thing I did not notice until joining the fuselage is these big ol' sink marks on either side of the vertical stabilizer.  Squadron putty to the rescue.

 

[Alex]

So having fully cleaned up the fuselage and wing assembly seams, and restored (to the best of my mediocre ability) the lost panel line and rivet detail, I had run out of delaying tactics and was forced to confront the task of joining wings to fuselage (recall on page 1 we confirmed how poorly the two fit as delivered by SH).  So I began by making and test-fitting posts to spread the wing surfaces and make them thicker in section to match the wing roots.

 

On the port side I started with one, right where the wing root was thickest:

 

Also on that side, the fuselage molding extended down too far below the wing root, interfering with the bottom of the wing section.  Because it won't show once assembled, I just hacked away at it:

 

For those thinking about building this kit, note that this was a problem on the port side only, at least on my copy...

 

The wing root was also shaped differently, staying thicker farther forward than it was possible to stretch the wing, so with the posted wing dry-fitted I scribed a line to file to that should bring the wing root into line.

 

It turned out that it would also be good to increase the depth of the wing section farther back:

 

 

So I added a second post:

 

Then I protected the side of the fuselage with tape, and proceeded to file down the wing root to meet my scribed line:

 

 

It was necessary to clamp and glue the thing up one side at a time, as the wing section needed to be flexed a bit to get both sides fitting "well".  I have a bunch of these cheap plastic spring clamps:

 

The major weakness of these is that the clamping pads are slippery plastic, so they will slip off of most things you try to clamp unless the surfaces are very close to parallel (which the back edge of the wings/roots here were not).  To get around this (and honestly I should have thought to do this long ago) I borrowed a woodworking trick and faced the pads with some fine wet/dry sandpaper (this is a classic woodworking thing to do with home-made jigs, sleds, etc so that wood won't slip on them):

 

This worked extremely well.

Edited June 1, 2020 by Alex

[Alex]

Once the whole thing was glued up, that wing root mated up much better, although there's plenty of smoothing yet to do on that coarsely-filed surface:

 

The starboard side had a bigger gap between root and wing than did the port - I'll need to stuff some Evergreen sheet in here:

 

This is also going to require some work:

 

As is this - the shape of the tail section is fundamentally deeper than how the wing section is molded.  

 

You know you are into it when you need to get the woodworking tools out:

 

I squished it to make the edges match, applied copious Tamiya extra-thin, and went for a 4 hour bike ride to make sure it really set up well before I tried to remove the clamp.

 

I was afraid that there was so much tension in the plastic that it might pop back apart once the clamp came off, but it actually held.  A relief.  On to patching with Evergreen:

 

Just needed a little bit of putty on the port side:

 

Starboard side smoothed and puttied after the glue set up

 

Still needs fine sanding, but much-improved

 

Evergreen plus Squadron putty plus a lot of sanding got this shaped up too:

 

Obviously there's plenty of smoothing still to be done, but the shape is there.  All in all it was only a couple hours' work to get all the seams straightened out.  I have found that it really helps to have the combo of Squadron putty (toluene-based, much more "structural", takes real sanding/filing once dry) and Perfect Plastic putty (water-based, only good for narrow cracks, but can be put on and quickly wiped with a damp Q-tip for an almost-instant fix) in my toolkit.  I still need to fine-sand and then cover all the putty with Mr Surfacer, and then re-scribe, but overall I'm pleased - I was worried that this would be significantly harder to do than it was.

 

 

[Out2gtcha]

Looks good! Fixing things like that can be very satisfying.

[Troy Molitor]

The joy of the Special Hobby kits.  PCM is also right up there.  But, it’s a Ki-27 and it looks awesome so far.  

[Alex]

30 minutes ago, Troy Molitor said:

The joy of the Special Hobby kits.  PCM is also right up there.  But, it’s a Ki-27 and it looks awesome so far.  

Yeah, and if I stick with my 1/32 "Pacific Adversaries" plan I've got a number of additional Special Hobby kits in my future.  Only way to get a 1/32 Claude or P-36.  I did manage to track down a 1/32 Polikarpov I-16 by Hasegawa, so that'll help out on the Chinese front.  It will be great when I get into the later years of WW2 in the Pacific - mostly Tamiya and Hasegawa there!

[LSP_Kevin]

23 minutes ago, Alex said:

I did manage to track down a 1/32 Polikarpov I-16 by Hasegawa

 

I'm pretty sure that's a reboxing of the ICM kit.

 

Kev

[Alex]

55 minutes ago, LSP_Kevin said:

 

I'm pretty sure that's a reboxing of the ICM kit.

 

Kev

Well, I guess it is what it is.  I will have my Soviet-supplied Chinese fighter one way or another - otherwise what would the Claude have to shoot at?

[LSP_Kevin]

3 minutes ago, Alex said:

Well, I guess it is what it is.  I will have my Soviet-supplied Chinese fighter one way or another - otherwise what would the Claude have to shoot at?

 

Indeed. You're doing great work on this one so far! The ICM kit will be no challenge for you.

 

Kev

[dennismcc]

This is looking good, there is nothing like overcoming challenges like this kit throws up, very satisfying, my next three kits are all PCM so I must remember this !

Keep up the good work.

 

Cheer

 

Dennis

[MikeMaben]

[TwoHands]

I must be the only one that is seeing numbers instead of pictures you have posted?

 

 

Edited June 4, 2020 by TwoHands

[D.B. Andrus]

Beautiful work there, Alex. Turning out to be quite a stunner.

 

Cheers,

 

Damian

[MikeMaben]

7 hours ago, TwoHands said:

          I must be the only one that is seeing numbers instead of pictures you have posted?

 

Hover your cursor over the numbers/letters and right click , then select 'view image'.

If that doesn't work select 'reload image'. It will take you to the page the images are

from so click the back arrow and then reload the LSP page.

I have to do that frequently but it works.

[Alex]

5 hours ago, MikeMaben said:

 

Hover your cursor over the numbers/letters and right click , then select 'view image'.

If that doesn't work select 'reload image'. It will take you to the page the images are

from so click the back arrow and then reload the LSP page.

I have to do that frequently but it works.

 

Curious.  What browser are you using to view the site?  I use Chrome (on Mac OSX) and pretty much never run into trouble seeing the images in anyone's post.  For the record, I'm hosting my photos on my FB page in albums I have labeled as public so that I can link them here...  I know a lot of folks use Photobucket, but FB is free, and I could not figure out a way to do this from Google Images.