Hasegawa 1/72 Nakajima Ki-49-I Type 100 Heavy Bomber Donryu "Helen"

HASEGAWA 1:72 NAKAJIMA KI-49-I
TYPE 100 DONRYU [HELEN]

Reviewer: John Mancini (rec.models.scale)
Kit Review submitted: 6 April 2008

Kit

This is a nice kit which comes in a medium to large box and all the sprues are wrapped in the usual cellophane pack. Including the 19 clear parts there are just over a 100 parts in this kit. Surface detail is excellent and the parts are up to the usual high quality from Hasegawa.

Instructions

A large fold out sheet with details about the aircraft, sprue map, easy to follow assembly steps, colour call outs from the Gunze Sangyo range and four-view marking and decal diagrams for the two versions in the kit.

Construction

As ever this starts inside the cockpit and all the parts fit very nicely. There is not a great amount of detail so some extra scratchbuilding is warranted, especially with the reasonably sized canopy set later. You get seats, figures, instrument panels with decal and control columns. It was very difficult to find any good information on the interior including colours so I followed Hasegawa’s example and hoped for the best. There are some good sites on the Internet which provide some insight into Japanese aircraft cockpits, so it was a case of combining different information and making my own judgements.

The fuselage halves go together nicely before moving onto sub assemblies of the props and engine nacelles. These fit together rather well and then set aside to dry while the sub assembly of wings was attended to. These also fit very well together and are mated with the nacelles before slotting into the fuselage. At this stage the bomb bay and undercarriage can also be dealt with and affixed into place, all of which presented no problems.

Finally hit a snag with the nose cone glazing as well as the other glazing on the kit. These were a bit troublesome to fit, with some sanding around the nose in particular needed. But again this is nothing compared to many limited run kits tackled in the past. There are two areas to be aware of, obviously don’t put on the gunner’s glazing until the gun has been put into place and for wheels up modellers there are marked parts to omit.

Construction of this model was very straight forward with only some minor areas of attention, most notably the glazing areas. Masts etc were added before moving onto painting.

Colour schemes

There are two options for finishing, both of which carry the same natural metal finish as the boxart. In fact these versions are from the Hamamatsu training school so are not even operational bombers. In spite of going against the trend of producing an accurate replica, I used the kit decals markings and painted my aircraft up as a bomber in upper dark green over medium grey undersides – hey it is my toy!!

Decals

A little on the glossy and possibly thick side but they are up to the usual Hasegawa quality and went on the model very well, virtually without any need to use decal solution. Once given an after gloss cote they looked painted on!

Accuracy

Don’t have a lot of reference material on this aircraft and I have read that there is a bit of conjecture on which versions had all the glazing and gunner positions, so that’s something that might need further research but for mine, the kit looks spot on in every way.

Conclusion

Overall this was a great kit to put together of a very interesting aircraft. The old Revell kit is certainly outclassed by this Hasegawa released, and as I have heard elsewhere, not overly accurate either. Kits like this make it a joy to build models with only perhaps the ever bain of Hasey kits being inadequate interiors as a negative. But I would still highly recommend this kit to all and it is great to have good quality options to build Japanese WW2 aircraft when USAF, UK and Luftwaffe examples seem to otherwise dominate.

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