1/32 Hasegawa N1K2-J Shiden Kai 343-45

[Thunnus]

Thanks for checking in! Finally have an update to post.  The cockpit has been glued together...

 

And the cockpit has been glued into the fuselage. The rear cockpit sill is a photoetch part from the Brengun set.  

 

Playing around with the engine placed on the fuselage.  I've glued the cowl flaps onto the engine cowling and have painted the interior of the cowling black.

 

Finally worked up the nerve to tackle the wing bottom rivet job.

 

The Shiden Kai has a LOT of rivets so just drawing the rivet guide lines takes time.

 

As with the fuselage, the amount of drawn lines caused smudging so I decided to do the center of the fuselage in a separate step.

 

After the rivets were applied, the entire wing bottom was sanded to remove the excess plastic around the rivet holes.  A brown pastel wash was placed over the wing bottom to check the work.  After any necessary corrections, I'll clean off the wash as much as possible to prepare for the painting stage.  

[Out2gtcha]

That looks terrific John - definitely worth the effort

[LSP_Kevin]

Stunning work, John! That cockpit looks great.

 

Kev

[MikeMaben]

 

     ...mmHmm 

 

 

[Troy Molitor]

Stunning x 2!

[scvrobeson]

Always excellent work.  All of that effort has definitely paid off with the rivet job.

 

 

 

Matt 

[CZPetrP]

This is precision work. A joy to watch.

[machine_marty]

Brilliant..! Nice clean work, very inspirational 

[turbo]

Lovely work John, the riveting really brings it to life!

[markiii]

I'm late to the show, but a trick I learned in art class to prevent lead from smudging is to use aerosol hair spray.

Don't know how it would work on plastic, but it works great on paper.

[Alex]

Engine looks fantastic mounted up.  Hope my Zero turns out half that good....

[Thunnus]

Thanks guys!  The riveting work is almost done.  Just the upper wings left to do.  I've been using the drawings in the Aero Detail book as my riveting guide and luckily, they are scaled at 1/48.  So it was a pretty easy thing to scan and print them to 1/32 scale.  Which makes copying the rivet lines onto the model a little bit easier.

After the lines have been drawn in pencil...

 

After the rivets have been applied and the pencil lines cleaned off...

 

And finally the wings after they've been sanded and a given a brown pastel wash.

 

Another round of dry-fitting to check the overall appearance of the rivet job.  By now, I've scrubbed the pastel wash off of the fuselage so those rivets aren't going to show up well in photos until the end.

 

I've chosen to depict the combat flaps in the down position although they were only engaged in flight.  Let's assume that they could be lowered on the ground for maintenance. Also note that the rivets aren't visible at this distance.  Which is indicative of the subtlety that I like about the rivets that you can get with a riveting wheel.

 

I added some wiring to the wheel wells. The other metal bits you see are from the Brengun PE set.  Taking a page from my Corsair build, I figured out that I could glue the wheel wells to the wing spar without gluing these into the wing.  This made the wiring work a little easier.

[spyrosjzmichos]

Exceptional work John!

Looking fantastic! 

[MikeMaben]

 

Sweet  

[Kagemusha]

So much to admire.