Kit: Ki-45
Scale : 1/48
Kit Number: 4819
Manufacturer : Nichimo
Price: $26.75
Media: Injected plastic
Decals: 53rd Sentai
Date of Review: October 29 1997
Reviewer: James Bevis
This model was my first experience with Nichimo products; and I liked it. When I opened the box, I was impressed by the multitude of recessed rivet heads along virtually every panel line. It's really amazing. The skin of the plane has a peculiar sandblasted appearance.
Panel lines are recessed. The control surfaces have a fabric texture. Interior detail is good, with all of the basic shapes and detail. It includes five different control panels to glue to the fuselage side walls, oblique 20mm cannons, an intricate one-piece gun sight, pretty good instrument panel, control column, one other lever, reasonably good seats, and a rear swivel mount with no gun. There isn't any frame detail on the cockpit walls, the rear position could use some. A pilot figure was included. One of the few sink holes in the kit is in the center of his chest. It's definitely the largest sinkhole!
I loved the engines! The crankcase forms a core that both cylinder banks slip onto. It has separate intake and exhaust manifolds. Five parts plus the propeller shaft. The molded-in exhaust ports on the nacelles are totally inaccurate. For the versions depicted by the decal sheet they should be on the bottom with two large tubes. Instead, they are on the top with multiple exhaust tubes, which aren't very real looking anyway. It would be simple to modify, but I didn't. The only picture with multi-port exhaust that I could find was a captured example in U.S. markings with natural metal finish. Go figure.
The main undercarriage is nice, too. five parts per side, plus the wheels. I liked the "knuckle" being separate from the leg. There isn't any detail in the landing gear wells. The gear doors have frame lightening holes cast in, they are a little rough.
The instructions were the weakest point of the kit. Printed in Japanese, a translation sheet is supplied. Painting instructions are totally inadequate. Overall, the kit is definitely not a disappointment to me.
Construction
The crew compartments went together pretty well. I used a fuselage half as a jig to align the bulkheads and radio shelf. The small lever to the right of the pilot's seat was a tight fit when the fuselage was closed around the cockpit. I left the rear swivel mount off until I was ready to glue-up the fuselage halves, since it indexes into both fuselage sides. The gun sight ended up being too high when I installed the pilot's canopy, I had to pop it off and file the dashboard down a bit to make it fit.
The fuselage halves aligned well, with little discrepancy in the panel lines. The wings and tail planes demanded some serious flat sanding, since the mating surfaces weren't anything like flat. They were kind of rounded and left bad gaps in every seam when I dry fitted them.
The only real mistake I made with this kit was to misalign one of the wing-half sets. I wiped out the alignment pins when I flat-sanded, this was a tricky spot. This misalignment caused extra work on that wing root. Both wing roots needed careful fitting and some filling. The misaligned wing also aggravated setting the wing dihedral. This isn't a foolproof step in any case, since the tabs on the wing roots have no positive index.
The instructions have the main gear assemblies installed before the wings are closed, which I chose not to do. Working through the openings was tight but possible. I could have saved aggravation by dry-fitting the parts to their baseplates before I assembled the wings, because squeezing the parts in and out of the gear bays a little nerve-wracking.
The canopies had to be filed some for good fit. I had to heat both canopies in hot water and spread them out at the base, they were about 3mm too narrow. I guess the gunsight would have cleared the canopy except for this necessary fitting. A small section of fuselage just behind the front canopy is separate to fit around the oblique cannon; it also took some work, especially in the slots for the cannon muzzles.
Painting and Decals
I used my own judgement on detail colors. The instructions were useless on this point. The camo I chose was same as the box-top painting. By the way, this painting really does a good job of matching pictures of the original aircraft, right down to the shapes in the camo-pattern.
The aircraft depicted on the box top was from the 3rd Chutai, 53rd Sentai. I'd planned to go with that color scheme, but the multiple stripes around the spinners were too much for me. Another aircraft from the same unit is shown at the bottom of the instruction sheet. This second aircraft has solid colored spinners and is shown on the side of the box.
The decals are translucent. Since the hinomarus are on wide white bands, this will be obvious if uncorrected. Furthurmore, they wrinkled badly when I applied them. Probably want to toss them. I ended up stripping them off in prep for painting the bands and applying aftermarket decals. The unit insignia on the wasn't so bad and I left it, to avoid trashing the paint job.
Opinion of the kit
It was fun, reasonably priced, and challenging but not too difficult. If I weren't lucky enough to have a decent reference on hand I would have been lost when painting time rolled around. Matter of fact, I needed a reference to keep me motivated on this kit, since the instructions are so incomplete.
Reference
I used ARCO's WW2 Aircraft Fact File, Japanese Army Fighters, Part One. It has the development history, some line drawings, a ghost view of the whole plane, five distinctly different color side views, and pictures of all the aircraft on the decal sheet. Too bad the kit decals didn't work out.