Ki-61-1 Tei 'Black Crow' in 1/72 Scale by Francesco Borraccino

Far too long in abeyance in AoJ's dusty and cobweb shrouded waiting room but appropriately following on from a Desperate Sunset is the 1/72 scale Ki-61-I Tei model made from the superlative Tamiya kit by Francesco Borraccino. The model represents an aircraft of the 110th Shinbu-tai 'Keppu-tai' (血風隊 - 'Blood Wind unit') flown by 3rd shotai leader 2nd Lt. Toshiro Kubokawa who noted that his assigned aircraft, a new Hien, Aikoku # 7436, donated by Mr Etsutaro Ichihara, was painted matt black like a crow on the upper surfaces with plain red hinomaru. The characters for Keppu-tai are painted on the fuselage and the pilot's name applied vertically beneath the cockpit, grimly preceded by the character 故 meaning late or deceased. 

This special attack unit of 12 Hien was formed from the 5th Rensei Hikotai in China, conducted special attack training at Xī jiāo airfield, Beijing and on 25 May 1945 transferred to Chiran airfield in Japan to participate in attacks against US vessels off Okinawa. The 'crow black' Hien crashed and overturned after failing to take-off on 26 May. 2Lt Kubokawa was injured but survived. 

Francesco judged the Tamiya kit as fantastic with perfect fit, engineering and remarkable detail, a pleasure to build. He limited extra detailing to adding hydraulic circuit cables to the landing gear, covers to the cowling and wing gun apertures as armament was removed, and the antenna wires (with great difficulty!). 

The only drawbacks to the kit in his opinion were the absence of underwing racks and drop tanks, a surprising omission as the 1/48 Tamiya kit has them included, and the decals which he found to be thick and not conforming to detail. 

The underwing racks were taken from a Finemolds kit whilst the drop tank and bomb came from the Arma Hobby Ki-84. 

After some consideration he decided to represent the black as the anti-glare colour, mixing Tamiya X-18 Semi-Gloss Black with Gunze H-5 Gloss Blue, H-13 Matt Red and H-39 Purple Gray to represent the colour # 32 Koku Ran Shoku (黒藍色 - Black Indigo Colour), The Kanji characters on the model were hand painted with white enamel but Francesco had to use the Hinomaru decals from the kit as he did not have a compass cutter which could produce the correct diameters to paint them on as he would have preferred.

With special thanks to Francesco for sharing these images of his very fine Hien model, distinctive and different from the usual Kobayashi Tei kit presentations.

Image credit: All photos © 2024 Francesco Borraccino