Kyushu J7W Shinden – Hasegawa

Hasegawa’s 1/48 Kyushu J7W kit has been around since 1981, that’s a long time – back to days of raised panel lines. The kit has been reissued with new parts and/or decals many, many times and is still available now.
Of course, if you wanted a modern kit of this airplane in 1/48, you could always go with the Zoukei-Mura kit. As a matter of fact, you SHOULD go with that kit, even given that its 2.5x the price in the US. That looks to be a beautiful kit with lots of interior goodies. However, if you had this kit in your stash forever like I did, I’m ok with building it. The first decision was how to finish this, as this airplane never made it past the prototype(s) stage. There are a few photos of a captured shinden in a state of repair in a damaged factory close to the war end. That will make a wonderful way to finish this kit if you want to be ‘historically accurate’.


Okay, let’s start with the cockpit – given that this kit was from the 1980’s, cockpit area wasn’t too bad. But we can definitely do better with a minimum of scratch work and some plastic pieces. As you can see, I completely built up the radio area behind the seat, added misc. consoles with plastic and spare PE pieces – most of which is my ever-dwindling stash of Reheat cockpit faceplates that I’ve been hoarding for the last 30 years. You can see the original cockpit out of the box and the revised one on the next 2 pictures.



Some more oxygen bottles were added, as well as some Eduard Steel seat belts and other misc piping and switches. This was followed with detailed painting, additional items from the Eduard zoom PE set, and the cockpit was ready to go.



Once the cockpit was closed up, the rest of the build is fairly straight forward, frankly, not too many pieces. Just remember to add nose weight to prevent a tail sitter. I used the Liquid Gravity product for that purpose. I sprayed everything with Aluminum Metalizer and the forward wing area with Yellow as per usual with ww2 Japanese aircraft. I then masked off the panels that would remain unpainted in preparation for the green paint.

To replicate the worn paint, I gave a coating of Ammo by Mig ‘chipping fluid’ first before the green camo paint. I then used a small brush to create some great worn effect on the paint.


I also decided to paint the hinomaru markings, as they would be worn and also missing from the replacement panels.

After this, its just a matter of removing the masking and attaching the various under carriage and antennas.



