The Unofficial Airfix Modellers' Forum

Pleased to have finished this neat kit from the starter set. Action begins in my Workbench around here:
http://uamf.org.uk/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=471&start=1365

Painted in Xtracolor hemp enamel, with burnt umber and Tamiya Smoke staining. The interior colour was a mix of silver, blue and green. (I am informed that silver overlaid with Tamiya clear blue is a better solution).



The very obvious panel lines were not highlighted, except for the engine cowling, and control surface hinge lines.



The undercarriage and wheel doors are delicate and fiddly to fit.



I added the gunsight, seat belts and nav lights, and I replaced the kit pitot tube with a pin.



Kit decals performed quite well, but needed coaxing to bed down over some panel lines.



Highly recommended! Just be careful of the undercarriage parts.

Cheers,

David

Wonderful! That is a fantastic build David

Splendid job - and well done for avoiding flooding every panel line with black.

Thats one of the best new Zero´s I´ve seen. The suddued weathering/shading is superb!

Great looking Airfix Zero, well done

Lovely looking build as always mate. I have two of these given as presents by my wife & kids a while back, so I'll do one wheels up and one wheels down, so thanks for the tip about care with the u/c building.
I was checking through my paints the other day and found a tin of Xtracolor Hemp so thanks for that reference as well! Hope mine come out half a nice as yours.
Cheers
Al.

Nicely done.

Brilliant work.

Lovely work. I built mine wheels up because of the delicate u/c.
Think I want to do another after seeing this

A really fine build, David, in fact one of the nicest I've seen of this kit. Although I can't quite see it now behind the glass, I know your scratchbuilt replacement gunsight is a little work of art in itself!

Wow. Lovely Job. I fancy building another one now.

Absolutely superb in every way. The shading and weathering are spot on, modelling perfection mate.

It's a nice little kit, I did one. Not as good as this though.

Many thanks, fellow modellers!
The last Zero I built was the the Fujimi 1/48 Model 21 kit, about 30 years ago!

Cheers,

David

I just bought one of these from a local store on the cheap,now that I have seen how good they can be built and how mine will never be as good as that,I will put it away and build something else.

My few cents on the IJN's "Lt Grey" colour.
There is a lot of confusion as to what colour the IJN used on Zeros, it does vary wildly as newly painted aircraft were very lt.grey and weathered quite quickly into a number of colours. Very hard to pick in B/W photographs.
The best and closest available paint other than hand mixed varieties is Tamiya XF-76 Grey Green (IJN).
This appears to very nicely reproduces a 'scale' version of the correct colour and with added warming or cooling colours a 'realistic' finish can be achieved. Some find XF-76 a bit too 'dark' and 'green' whilst others prefer it.
It's all pretty much up to the modeller's mind's eye view of the subject.
Hope this helps with future early war Zero builds