Ki-115 Tsurugi
Text: Vladimír Šulc
Illustration: Piotr Forkasiewicz
Cat. No. 11192
The Ki-115 Tsurugi is a very specific aircraft, designed for kamikaze missions. It was a technologically simple aircraft that could be built quickly and in large series. Fortunately, the war ended in time for these aircraft to never see combat. Most of the 104 aircraft produced were delivered unpainted, with only the national insignia sprayed on. They never entered service; after the war, they were bulldozed to the edge of the airport and covered with dirt. And there they remain to this day. One relatively well-preserved example, transported to the US after the war, is now on display at the Pima Air and Space Museum in Arizona, right next to a B-29 Superfortress. That is, the aircraft that ended World War II and the associated bloodshed by dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Without this act, which is generally condemned today, further bloodshed would undoubtedly have continued. And the Tsurugi would certainly have played a significant role in it.
From the perspective of the genre we are currently focusing on, i.e., describing the events in the boxart of the kit, this is not very interesting. The aircraft did not fly or fight, so there is basically nothing to write about. Fortunately. However, what can be written about is the history of the creation of the Ki-115 kit. This is also an interesting story, and I will now tell it to you.
Eduard has a long history of producing plastic kits. We introduced the first two kits, the Sopwith Baby and Schneider floatplanes in 1/72 scale, in the fall of 1992. They were typical short-runs of the 1990s with all their shortcomings, lots of flash, no snap-fit parts, and not much detail. The moulds and moulding were initially provided by MPM, now Special Hobby. We then quickly began working with Pavel Vanďalík and his father, who also produced epoxy moulds, which they still do today, but because both are professional toolmakers, their moulds were of a much higher technological standard and the quality of the mouldings was much better. This was a big step forward, a huge leap in quality! At the end of the 1990s, we started building our own tool shop. We introduced galvanic electroplating, and so the moulds were already made in metal. However, all the master templates for the kits were still handcrafted. At the peak of this technology, they were produced by two master designers, Zdeněk Sekyrka and Jindřich Balon, who gradually built a team of casters, machinists, toolmakers, and moulders around them. However, the 1990s were also a time of rapid digitization and the advent of computers, and CAD programs, which were still new at the time, were penetrating all areas of industry. We had many years of experience with CAD design, and we began designing etchings on computers as early as 1990, and the same was true for decals.
We always knew that the old motto "give work to machines" still applied. With the arrival of the new millennium, we therefore embarked on a project to digitize the tool shop. We approached it generously, securing financing that enabled us to purchase high-quality machines, programs, and our first CNC milling machine for the time. We didn't skimp; we chose Unigrafix, now Siemens NX, for the design. We were also able to build the foundation of a design and programming team, which consisted of our employees as well as new experts from old engineering companies in the area that were being shut down at the time. Many of these founding figures are still with Eduard today, and what you receive from us is still their work. However, the beginnings were difficult. We learned a lot in training courses and we already knew a lot, but we were doing new things that no one had any experience with, and learning them came at a high price.
The first project we successfully completed was the engine for the Bf 108 in 1/48 scale. The next piece was more ambitious, a quarter-scale Sopwith Camel. We completed this project as well, but we weren't very satisfied. Some parts of the kit didn't look the way we imagined; it was all so rough and misshapen, and even the moulds didn't work the way we imagined. The next project was Curugi. We chose it not because we were Kamikaze at heart, although in retrospect it may seem that way, but because we needed a simple aircraft in which we could apply what we had learned from building the Camel and also try out some new things. The most important of these was riveting. We riveted the entire surface of the model and launched it on the market with great expectations at the beginning of 2004 and got a lot of criticism from reviewers. The biggest criticism was about the rivets. They wrote that the surface looked like it had been shot through with a machine gun and that this was definitely not the way to go. It was so intense that we decided to remove the rivets. At that time, we were already working intensively on the Mirage IIIC, which we did not rivet and made it in the classic way, with rivets only along the panelling. We returned to riveting eight years later with the arrival of another wave of innovation and the introduction of directly milled and spark-abrasive moulds made of Certal, a special aluminium alloy developed for the production of injection moulds.