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Ki-84 Hayate "Frank"

by John Kerr
images by Richard Chafer

This kit is Hasegawa's new 1/48 scale Ki-84 Hayate "FRANK". You may have already read glowing reports of this kit already. The good news is that it's all true. In my humble opinion, I rate the Ki-84 as the best 1/48 scale aircraft kit Hasegawa has produced to date.

Given Dan Salamone's Hasegawa Ki-84 kit-build article on Hyperscale (very nice work Dan!) I will not go into an in-depth review of how I built the same kit (please refer to Dan's excellent article).

The only areas I would highlight are:

• slight wingroot step on my left fuselage - probably my fault as the right fuselage step was non-existent, 

• the numerous poly-caps for various locating holes (do not dismiss them as a "cute gimmick" as the poly-caps allow the propeller, undercarriage legs, tail wheel, under-wing fuel cooler and drop-tanks to be firmly secured without glue).

I chose to use scheme number 13 from AeroMaster's "SPECIAL ATTACK SQUADRONS" deluxe set. This set covers 27 Japanese Army and Navy "Kamikaze" aircraft from late in the war.

The suggested paint scheme is Army Dark Brown (approx. 30118) over Army Grey/Brown (approx. 36424). To me, the AMD colour profile does not look Brown, instead it looks more Green/Brown. In looking for a close match, I used Testor's Model Master's Olive Drab FS 34087 (close enough for me).

The metal weathering evident on all upper surfaces of my Ki-84 is actually the Floquil "Old Silver" basecoat. The Olive Drab upper paint coat has been chipped and scrapped away with a hobby knife blade to reveal the underlying "Old Silver".

The "Dive Bombing Eagle" fuselage artwork is very different and was the main motivating reason I chose this particular scheme.

The Hinomarus also came from the AeroMaster set. I used the Yellow wing leading decals from the kit (these went on surprisingly well for kit decals and snuggled down nicely with a bit of setting solution).

To quickly sum up, I found Hasegawa's new Ki-84 an absolute joy to build. While not an overnight build, the end result screams "quality". In comparison, I've nearly finished a TAMIYA 1/48 Ki-84 and while this kit is tidy, the Hasegawa offering is light years ahead in detail, engineering and assembly.

The model formed part of the "Pacific Air War" aircraft theme display at the annual South Australian Scale Model Expo (Adelaide, Australia) on the weekend of October 30/31 1999.

Many thanks to Richard Chafer for the digital images.

Article and Model Copyright © 1999 by John Kerr
Images Copyright © 1999 by Richard Chafer
Page Created 15 December, 1999
Last updated 26 July, 2007

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