The Little World

Or Nakajima Ki-27 if you want to be technical.

This one slipped through the studio without being photographed on the sprues – but that happens sometimes when you get distracted and are anxious to start doing something.

It was a Sunday afternoon visit to an old hobby shop that started it – the shop is running down and the selection of 1:72 scale kits is very thin – but the box art for this one caught my eye – in particular the roundels on the wings. What in the world? They look like something that Disney would have drawn up. Then the note about Manchukuo…

Well, I needed a kitfix, so I sacrificed the money…just because they are trying to sell the business doesn’t mean that they are dropping their prices…and brought it home. There wasn’t that much in the size of the kit , but there was a lot of detail included for the cockpit. Photoetch that was just going to be lost in the depths of the tiny hole under the canopy. So I preserved that in my box of accessories and forged ahead.

While the thing was setting I dived for the internet and looked up what the plane actually did – it did a lot. It was used for a good deal of the fighting in the Japanese and Soviet war on the Manchurian border – with a fair number of kills of Soviet fighters. Apparently it had a very tight turning circle.

The roundel was the device adopted to attach it to the puppet regime’s air force – the colours indicating the entire world under the domination of the yellow of the old Manchu dynasty. It’s a construct, but a pretty one. The lettering of the side of the fuselage turns out to be some form of declaration that the aircraft was the gift of loyal citizens or organisations to the air force. Apparently the Japanese army extorted this sort of payment to buy aircraft.

It is a sweet little plane, with an undercarriage that turned out to be surprisingly easy to build. I was expecting trouble but it was fine. That’s a tail skid, rather than a wheel.

This is one of the first uses of the new paints: the Mr. Color lacquer rather than the aqueous version. It flowed beautifully.

A thoroughly satisfying build.