Oh, my goddess +++ 1:72 Kyushu J7W "Shinden", 2nd, resurrected prototype (Hasegawa/based on Aa megamisama "On a wing and a prayer" manga)
New pics of an old kit, but one I hold pretty dear: because it was an accidental find (and never expected that such official merchandise existed at all!) and because I like (if not love) the manga where it comes from and in which the J7W has a brief appearance in one of the series' early stories.
I found this Hasegawa kit in a model kit shop for Japanese animation in Berlin, in a dark shop corner.
The kit itself is the standard 1:72 Hasegawa scale model of the WWII Shinden prototype. New water sliding decals and painting instructions were included, and the kit has been mostly built "out of the box".
The "paradigm" for this machine, which is supposed to be the (fictional) second Shinden prototyp which had been buried before the American invasion and lost, stems from a special edition of the "Oh, my goddess" manga, a one-shot story during the first or second series of books called "On a Wing and a Prayer", around 1997.
Actually, I was a bit suprised by the kit's colors, since the manga mentions a "green fuselage" - but this could also have been a translation error. Bit it is not: later I found out that "green" and "blue" use the same word in Japanese, so the confusion comes from the outsiders' point fo view. ;)
Hasegawa recommends white and a dark petrol blue, which is a non-standard color and has to be mixed manually. Other weird color details include the brown propeller (O.K., it's IJN primer, but looks pretty weird in the overall combo!) and the bright red landing gear insides... but since there are no other color references available (the manga is B/W), I stuck with Hasegawa's official instructions.
The kit itself is of high quality (typical Hasegawa standard) and the parts fit well.
The tricky job is the painting, though, with lots of white and the very complicated blue contrast areas with hard and straight demarcation lines, which are especially hard to paint on the fuselage, because of the air intake bulgings. I did not get it as good as I wanted to...
Another tricky part are the decals for some of the blue areas. While the idea of having some of the delicate shapes as a water decal at hand, matching the color of the printed decals and the rest of the paint is another task - you will recognize some areas with color differences ;)
Besides these troubles, some details in the cockpit and at the landing gear were added - overall a very good kit, but due to the delicate color scheme nothing for beginners or those faint at heart!
As a side note: In the meantime (well, many years have passed since I built this one), there's an 1:32 OOB offering of this specific bird from literature available, from Zoukei Moura. Funny to see that the company chose a much brighter blue, and it differs in some other details (e .g. having a white canopy framing), too.
Oh, my goddess +++ 1:72 Kyushu J7W "Shinden", 2nd, resurrected prototype (Hasegawa/based on Aa megamisama "On a wing and a prayer" manga)
New pics of an old kit, but one I hold pretty dear: because it was an accidental find (and never expected that such official merchandise existed at all!) and because I like (if not love) the manga where it comes from and in which the J7W has a brief appearance in one of the series' early stories.
I found this Hasegawa kit in a model kit shop for Japanese animation in Berlin, in a dark shop corner.
The kit itself is the standard 1:72 Hasegawa scale model of the WWII Shinden prototype. New water sliding decals and painting instructions were included, and the kit has been mostly built "out of the box".
The "paradigm" for this machine, which is supposed to be the (fictional) second Shinden prototyp which had been buried before the American invasion and lost, stems from a special edition of the "Oh, my goddess" manga, a one-shot story during the first or second series of books called "On a Wing and a Prayer", around 1997.
Actually, I was a bit suprised by the kit's colors, since the manga mentions a "green fuselage" - but this could also have been a translation error. Bit it is not: later I found out that "green" and "blue" use the same word in Japanese, so the confusion comes from the outsiders' point fo view. ;)
Hasegawa recommends white and a dark petrol blue, which is a non-standard color and has to be mixed manually. Other weird color details include the brown propeller (O.K., it's IJN primer, but looks pretty weird in the overall combo!) and the bright red landing gear insides... but since there are no other color references available (the manga is B/W), I stuck with Hasegawa's official instructions.
The kit itself is of high quality (typical Hasegawa standard) and the parts fit well.
The tricky job is the painting, though, with lots of white and the very complicated blue contrast areas with hard and straight demarcation lines, which are especially hard to paint on the fuselage, because of the air intake bulgings. I did not get it as good as I wanted to...
Another tricky part are the decals for some of the blue areas. While the idea of having some of the delicate shapes as a water decal at hand, matching the color of the printed decals and the rest of the paint is another task - you will recognize some areas with color differences ;)
Besides these troubles, some details in the cockpit and at the landing gear were added - overall a very good kit, but due to the delicate color scheme nothing for beginners or those faint at heart!
As a side note: In the meantime (well, many years have passed since I built this one), there's an 1:32 OOB offering of this specific bird from literature available, from Zoukei Moura. Funny to see that the company chose a much brighter blue, and it differs in some other details (e .g. having a white canopy framing), too.