Here's a look at Hasegawa's very neat kit of the Nakajima E8N1. It's exciting to see Hasegawa releasing new WW2 subjects - especially something a little less-than-obvious like the "Dave".

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Great review Rowan. That certainly is a surprise package from Hasegawa, and it looks really nice out of the box.

Cheers, D

Very welcome subject! First "Pete". Then "Rufe". Now "Dave". I hope a new "Jake" is in the works, too; I have their 1/72 "Alf" and hope the tool a 1/48 one, too; I suspect that floatplanes would be a hot series if Hasegawa makes them. For me it looks satisfying without their extra upgrade set - except for the Type 92 machine gun. It looks better than awful but c'mon, at least put a rivet or two on it so it has token detail; Nichimo's Type 92 in their 50-yr-old "Kate" is far superior.

Nice review - A surprise to say the least ! I watched and waited with great anticipation when Hasegawa announced their Pete kit well in advance of it being available here in the USA. I pre ordered it from a major internet retailer and when it came I was delighted to find it included the dedicated photoetch set as a bonus. It was a very enjoyable build indeed. Fast forward to the Dave kit - my first knowledge of it was when I saw it listed as a new arrival on the same retailer's home page and already sold out ! Got on the wait list and after a short time a new batch arrived and I got mine . I was happy to find that a photo etch set was produced for the Dave in the same style as the Pete but not included - no worries - it's only money so I promptly e mailed the retailer to try to obtain one. I included Hasegawa's Part number for the set as called out in the Dave's instructions. They had no knowledge of set or any idea on availability. I did some research and contacted the North American distributor for Hasegawa with the same result - no one knew anything about it. I like to give US retailers my business but I had to source the photoetch from Japan via the Internet . Now all I need is some time to build it. This isn't a complaint really - I

Oops ! Reply continued - I am just baffled by the two different ways the release of these very similar kits was handled- I assume that most modelers will want the photo etch but they made it difficult to buy it. This was a while ago so perhaps it is now available here in the USA. Cheers ! Richard

VERY strange antics with the wire rigging. And annoying too. Plus, it IS hard to track down the rigging set here in the States, at least for now. It's a lovely kit, so far as it goes, but it doesn't go far enough in the rigging dept.

The high "import" price is the 45% inflated (over the Japanese domestic price printed on the box) MANUFACTURER SUGGESTED -FOREIGN- RETAIL PRICE, exclusively for overseas export kits, which Hasegawa started doing in September 2008 in their own FOREIGN DEALER CATALOGS, as was pointed out to me by my LHS owner, who showed me the +45% jack-up from the previous dealer catalog to the next... No such jack-up inside Japan, of course, because only foreigners are supposed to play the role of the suckers in this scenario...

Importers don't set the marketing policy of the manufacturers they import...

It is an extremely well-established habit of Japanese specialty manufacturers to retreat to their home market when the slightest sign of world wide economic trouble peers over the horizon, and in late 2008 it did more than peer...

At the same time that they jacked everything up near 50% -for foreigners- , almost eight years ago now, they also stopped all 1/48th WWII aircraft new tool kits, this new E8 being their first such kit in seven years... (Not exactly a subject of such excitement as to reflect the seven year wait... But again, who cares what the non-Japanese might be interested in...)

This behaviour by some Japanese kit makers (but NOT Tamiya for instance) is why you have a bevy of Japanese-based one-man "stores" on Amazon and elsewhere, to cash in on the avoidance of the distribution gouging Hasegawa chose to do... Plamoya, Hobbylink, Hobby Search and even Hobby Easy are other very good places to avoid the Hasegawa-determined price gouging specifically directed towards foreigners: Shipping is fast and only slightly more expensive with those Japanese dealers: Excellent service on all of them...

I don't know if the price-gouging is still as high as the +45% it was years ago, as I have not checked US sources in some time now, but Sprue Brothers continues to be the one US-based exception that avoids the price gouge on aircraft kits, but NOT, for instance, on Hasegawa ship kits (a pretty stiff price-gouging on those)...

Other than aircraft kits at Sprue Brothers, avoid buying Hasegawa kits from a US-based store...

Gaston