Tamegawa and the Case for Retooling

 

(This post was first published on June 1st, 2009. In the course of updating the image files for better quality and to retire Photobucket as the image vendor, the original post seems to have been lost, which is very annoying as this new version now appears thirteen years out of synch with its neighbours! Appologies...)

The giants from Shizuoka City need no introduction, there must be very few modellers in the world who don’t have Hasegawa and Tamiya kits in their stash. I find myself trying consciously not to talk too much about Tamiya, I don’t want to bias the content of this blog or have it become a Tamiya fan club, but quality does deserve to be discussed as and where it is encountered.

Hasegawa is a company for which I have had the greatest respect for the last 25 years, and I have a great many of their aircraft in my stash. I recently had reason to pull out their Bf 109 K-4 and was very pleased with the engineering, the look of the parts and the overall general accuracy. Detail by detail, she matches up with research for a very fair K-4. A few details can be added from styrene, you need to cut away the battery box of the G-10 behind the headrest and make the access hatch and canopy locking bars from scratch, but that’s easy enough. Same with adding the radiator actuator struts and some stiffeners inside the split flaps. The fuselage detailing right and left of the centreline doesn’t quite match up, but given that this kit was probably engineered in the earlier days of CAD-CAM, that’s fair enough.

One might expect the fact that the kit shares multiple parts for the G-6 and G-10 versions to cause problems with fit and engineering, this is fairly common. Indeed there are three instrument panels, redundant drop tanks and cannon gondolas, all sorts of bits not needed for the subject in hand, but they don’t seem to be a problem. In the old days Airfix would have sold this kit as the Bf 109 G/K, with instructions for using all the parts, and marking options for each type included on the sheet. (Remember their F-4 Phantom, with options to build the B, C, D, E and J all in the one box? Not a great kit but a versatile one with heaps of options.) Then companies discovered their range looked a lot bigger if they packaged the kit for each option separately, and each issue simply contained redundant parts.

But that’s by the by, the point of this post is that there is always room for improvement, and sometimes in ways you’d not expect.

I have completed two Tamiya 1:48th scale WWII fighters in the recent past, a Bf 109 E-3 and a P-51D. I was very impressed with their accuracy and ease of construction, and the quality of engineering throughout, and I was essentially expecting the Hasegawa engineering to be on a par. Overall it is, parts-fit is superb, dimensional accuracy looks spot-on, but I was frustrated to find an unexpected hitch. The cockpit. I thought initially that Hasegawa’s design solution of building up the cockpit from several parts as a subassembly to be mounted through the wing gap was a rather good idea, and it should have worked well, but…  

 First of all, the instrument panel is a different shape to the fuselage contour into which it is introduced, smaller, so it’s not simply a case of reshaping it with a bit of file work. This is a blunder I would not have expected of Hasegawa. Second, there is no positive location device for the panel either, so you’d be trying to tack it in place and keep your fingers crossed that it stays there. Third, the cockpit tub, though it assembles as a box structure, is not so accurately molded as to remove the tendency for the left wall to toe-in, so that the upper edge overhangs the cockpit sill. Fourth, there is no solid ledge against which the tub can be seated, so you’re supergluing it at its contact points and hoping for the best.

Hoping for the best? This is Hasegawa we’re talking about! The big guy, the one who makes Fujimi look second-rate! My solution was to glue the instrument panel to the cockpit walls and reinforce the joint with some scrap styrene, then use angle stock to reinforce the mounting surfaces behind the seat and some rod alongside the edges (below). With this lot it will hopefully stand up to the amount of handling to come without the panel becoming detached and disappearing forever inside. This was after a silly amount of fiddling, pulling apart and re-gluing, and the panel falling off and trying to vanish under my desk three times: not the experience I expect from this company.  

And not the experience I had with Tamiya. It’s been pondered why Tamiya have not yet expanded their 1:48th scale range to embrace the multitudinous possibilities of the Bf 109 F, G and K series aircraft, and the standard answer must be that Hasegawa have that market sewn up, with Hobbycraft taking up the slack for the cheap end of the field. ICM’s F-series planes are also very good, and strong contenders in the same race. But after my experience with the cockpit of this model I am dismayed to see that Hasegawa have used this device as standard engineering, certainly on their other Bf 109s, and the fact is that if Tamiya was to offer me brand new tooling of these subjects, engineered the way their other planes are, I would buy them in preference ever after. With Invisi-Clear decals such a kit would build as a stunner right out of the box.

So I find myself now doubly cautious about the asking price of models these days: Hasegawa’s K-4 is nearly Aus$40 on the shelf here, and that’s a lot of wedge for the firm to fall down on the details. I’m not asking companies to be perfect in every aspect, I have no doubt that this will be a superb subject in my display case when it’s finished, but I do look for sensible engineering where strength and fit are crucial. For instance the keyed alignment of the landing gear struts in Hasegawa’s 1:48th scale P-51D – a marvellous bit of planning and forethought. Maybe divinity really is in the details, and if so the race for sainthood will never be over: let’s just say, this cockpit fubar has delayed Hasegawa’s beatification slightly!