EZhotshot511 Posted July 2, 2019 Share Posted July 2, 2019 Greetings, I am attempting to understand why Eduard, back in the 90's when it tooled its PE sets for the 1/48 Tamiya M6A1 Seiran (item # 48219) and the 1/48 Hasegawa B7A Ryusei (Grace) (item # 48220), provided double shoulder straps for the seatbelts. In fact they are patterned identically for both aircraft, and more resemble contemporary American or Luftwaffe seatbelts than any other Japanese example. I do not know of any WWII Japanese aircraft having a shoulder strap for each shoulder, if any at all. The peculiar thing here is that Tamiya included double shoulder strapped seatbelt decals in all their 1/48 and 1/72 M6A kits. They are poorly detailed and do not look to be based in fact. Two theories I can come up with off the top of my head: 1. Out of shear lack of existing material and evidence Eduard went with double shoulder straps as their best guess, possibly based on the decals provided in the Tamiya kits. -OR- 2. Very late war Aichi produced aircraft were fitted with proprietary seatbelts unlike any other seatbelts fielded by either the IJN or IJA during the war. I want to get to the bottom of this as I am trying to determine what pattern of seatbelts to mount in my 1/72 M6A1-K Nanzan and my to-be-built 1/72 M6A1 Seiran, both being the Tamiya kits of course. Hopefully an expert on Imperial Japanese aviation can rise to the challenge. Quote Link to post Share on other sites
HistnScale Posted July 2, 2019 Share Posted July 2, 2019 Just speculating, Tamiya used the Seiran held by NASM for their research. If the aircraft had U.S. seat belts installed during the test/evaluation, Tamiya may have copied them in error. I will try to make time to dig into my records on the pre-restoration Seiran and see if it did indeed have U.S. belts installed. Cheers, Dave. Quote Link to post Share on other sites
skyhawk174 Posted July 2, 2019 Share Posted July 2, 2019 Well this is and interesting post. I had always been told that in Japanese aircraft it is one shoulder strap until later on tin the war. Later aircraft were two shoulder straps. I have several books by Ian Baker on Japanese aircraft and there may be stuff in there? Quote Link to post Share on other sites
EZhotshot511 Posted July 3, 2019 Author Share Posted July 3, 2019 Very interesting! I will definitley be around to hear whatever you gentlemen may find out. Could anyone recommend particular books (that are available) that would be a good technical references for very late war japanese aircraft? Quote Link to post Share on other sites
HistnScale Posted July 3, 2019 Share Posted July 3, 2019 Using Robert Mikesh's "Japanese Aircraft Interiors 1940-1945" as a quick reference since the book has pretty much all of the Japanese military aircraft assembled in one place. The only aircraft shown with a shoulder strap is the "Rex" float plane. Everything else has just a lap belt on original installations. There are a number of photos which show U.S. style belts which were added during testing. Off hand, I really cannot remember seeing photos of Japanese aircraft with anything other than a lap belt. I did have an opportunity to go over an original Type 21 Zero airframe and that one definitely did not have any sort of mounting for a shoulder belt. Figure on being pretty safe using a lap belt only. HTH, Dave. Quote Link to post Share on other sites
EZhotshot511 Posted July 6, 2019 Author Share Posted July 6, 2019 Thank you Sir! That definitely helps! Quote Link to post Share on other sites
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