Yeah baw 1:32 Saburo Shindo Zeke!

[Stikpusher]

Carlos,

Yeah buddy. And I tried reducing the formula by percentages. Unsuccessfully. So I bought glass jars to keep the mix in. I love that color so for me it’s good to have it on hand at all times.

[tempestjohnny]

So when you say 100 part of this color and 40 parts of another color, etc... how are you determining the parts? By the number of drops? By styringe levels?

As long as the "parts" are the same. 100 drops is the same as 100 55 gallon drums as long as everything is the same during the mix

[tempestjohnny]

Remember too. Depending on if the airframe was built by Mitsubishi or Nakajima there are differences in the paint

[Stuart]

That's looking awesome Kenny! That really is a huge looking model!

[KennyX]

Carlos,

I laughed out loud when I saw that.

TempestJohnny,

Oh shoot yeah, I forgot to mention that part. I’m doing what is, to the best of my knowledge as well as that of the researchers over @ Tamiya, a Mitsubishi A6M2. The Nakajima color mix by Greg and the gang over at JAircraft is indeed totally different (and nowhere near as pretty, not by a long shot in my opinion).

Stewart,

Cheers and thank you! Yeah man, I’m running out of room on my desk but hey- this scale is so much fun to build in!

[...]

Okay, so! Summer Vacation Time is pretty-much here! My sister and my brother in-law are in town visiting this week/weekend, and then this-coming Friday my wife and I will embark with the kids on what is to be our first “Good Old-Fashioned Family Vacation/Road Trip”, in the parlance of Clark Griswold. We’ll be driving up from Lafayette to Culpeper, VA to visit my mom and spend a week with her on her horse farm. I’m won’t be bringing models/supplies/tools with me on this one. And frankly- I’m looking forward to the break. Boy oh boy building this thing with my “newer, more disciplined approach” has taken a lot out of me.

Furthermore, I don’t want to rush this project to paint. As I said before. I suppose I could begin painting this coming week Monday - Thursday, but there’ll be so much going on with buttoning things up at work and stuff that it’d be fits and starts and rushing, and I don’t want that interfering with the paint job I intend to put on this sweet baby. Nope.

SO, as much as I would LOVE the gratification of getting the paint job knocked out before I leave, I’m going to wait. You know how it is... you wake up on a Saturday morning and want to drink a beer, but you don’t because you know it’ll taste better after you mow the lawn. And what’s more, you won’t have a headache while mowing the lawn like you might if you whack-down the Coors tallboy before you mow.

I have been conducting more tests though. And I’ll explain why...

1. This isn’t going to be a black-based build. I fully intend to use black Mr. Surfacer 1500 as primer, but I will be laying-down bare metal over that primer. Currently in the running for that job are: Tamiya AS-12 and Alclad Duraluminum. I haven’t decided which yet, because I’ve only tested this with AS-12 due to the fact that my Alclad hasn’t arrived in the mail ... when it gets here I’ll repeat my latest test with the Alclad base.

2. Lightening and darkening this color is ticklish business. Reason being— it takes very little to shift the color and screw it up, and furthermore- lightening with straight white can take all the olive right out of it if you’re not careful. During my tests, I’ve observed -as other modelers have- that Tamiya’s XF-76 is the perfect lightening shade for this color. The only issue? Use too much and the resulting color will look too weathered (consensus being that XF-76 is indeed a close enough match to what the color turns into once it’s been exposed to the elements for a long time and has started to chalk). Darkening this paint has its own pitfalls too. I want to have a darkened shade as an undercoat in certain areas so that I can paint just up to the panel lines with the lightened shade, to accentuate those panel lines just a very subtle little bit— “noticed but not seen.” Use too much black, and it takes too many blend coats to knock it back, and other subtlety and variation gets lost...

3. I’ll be painting this with a different process, one I haven’t used on an aircraft before, vis:

3.1 Lay-down the primer and polish it

3.2 Lay-down the bare-metal, and polish it

3.3 Cover the entire airframe with the base color, in thin, misting coats

3.4 Mix a darkened shade: Custom Color: 4 + NATO Black: 1 and overcoat parts of the airframe in light misting coats those areas where I would like more subtle variation and slightly accentuated panel lines, making sure to spray in a manner that leaves a nice, subtle transition from dark to lighter

3.5 Take the Custom Color, heavily thinned, and mottle that into the insides of all the panels where the darker shade got laid-down, in diffused patters, avoiding the panel lines as best as I can.

3.6 Mix the light shade: Custom Color: 4 + XF-76: 1 and mottle that into the middle of all panels as applicable, avoiding panel lines

3.7 Take the Custom Color, thin it way down, and spray blend coats.

3.8 Coat with Tamiya *Gloss Clear, and polish.

The effect you get looks like this:




















Note just a subtle bit of accentuation in the panel lines near the wing root. Also, note the subtle over all shift from dark to light and light to dark again depending on the angle. This gives life to the paint in a different manner than the tonal variation I get with the black basing. Instead of the paint having “character” like it does with black basing, the words “spirit” and “ephemeral” come to mind. So think of it like this, instead of adding “life” to the paint, I’m giving it “spirit” and this nicely coincides, at least in my mind, the otherworldly mystique these aircraft had when first observed by allied pilots.

Sheesh. That was a mouthful.

But this is what coalesces in my mind when I spend days/weeks ruminating on how to accomplish a paint job.

And all that said- the idea of trying to pull this off in, what— 6 days while working full-time, being a dad, and preparing for a road trip seems ludicrous to me.

What’s more, I’ll be taking all these experiments and subjecting them not only to subsequent tests like pigments for subtle washes, but tests like masking as well. Does the paint bite better into AS-12 or Alclad? I don’t need any disasters when masking/unmasking insignias and stripes, so that factor will weight heavily into the combination of primer X bare metal I decide on. SO, my Alclad experiment will commence as soon as it arrives in the mail.

Okay so between now and vacation I’m doing small details that deserve BIG attention. Like landing gear.

have a gander at this, lads:

What the Hell? Why’s the strut look like that?


Because IT WORKS:




Damndest thing I ever saw.

Hopefully this Zeke will be heavy enough to sit properly on those and compress them a bit!

I’ll disassemble those, mask the metal (yeah, that’s metal) and paint those components this weekend. Probably the covers too. And decal them, talk sweet to them, etc.

So that’s where we are! Thanks as always for looking.





*I am aware that “Gloss isn’t scale”. However, these aircraft were glossy at least pre-raid, and a flatter clear, even 50:50 Gloss/Flat and even 75:25 Gloss/Flat doesn’t give me that lovely, smooth, ephemeral transition in hues that I like. So I’m breaking a “rule” because I think it looks better with straight gloss. There will be no talking me out of this. You can do what you want. I won’t raise a finger. The only person this is “A Correct And Immutable Law” to is me and my stuff.

[pzl66]

She is puuuurdy!!

[BlackSheep214]

Looking forward for more. A vacation away from the bench is always a good thing. Once you return, you’ll feel more refreshed and focus on the build will be sharper. Enjoy your family vacation. You deserve it.

[Floki]

Sounds like you got a good plan of attack set up.

[kahunaminor]

Absolutely cracking work Kenny. That paint work and the reasoning you give behind it just rocks.

Really enjoying this one.

Regards,

[mustang1989]

Dude you're pulling out all the stops with this one bro. I learn every time I look in on one of your builds.