Yiannis Mitzas

Japanese Zero Wreck

Any self-respecting modeller. You have to creatively destroy a kit at some point, In this article I will try to help you give it a different look, playing with the weather conditions. I present to you some works of different creators for you to have a source of inspiration and we will explain step by step how we will present the weather during the years.
On my Zero

Assembly starts classically with the cockpit. I quickly realized that if I wanted to thin the fuselage skin to a realistic level (and this is necessary to remove all the missing parts), we need to build the entire interior from scratch. Canopy slides need to be completely redone as it is a detail missing from most of the kits. Thinning out the spindle halves with a Dremel, sandpaper and an X-acto blade. It is a quorum procedure Your first to choose a kit with good quality plastic
I deleted from the fuselage the intersection with the tailplane. The rear plane is tapered from the inside with the help of a magazine (fun, that one)… The gap left by this little surgery is filled with plastic card in the front and a small triangle in the back. After I finished all of that, I proceeded to cut out the front fuselage (which I kept), the rudder, and the various access hatches. It is not necessary to use an enhancement set in such a project. But some details help, depending on the kit and the amount of paint you want to achieve. If you wish to work on the cockpit, the radio position and the ammo box compartment in the forward fuselage. Canopy rails are made of evergreen “L” shaped beams, glued to the fuselage. The internal structure is made of 0.01 plastic card. Various boxes, counters, bottle holders, the radio and all the accessories that are in the radio seat case help in which realistic effect. Your first to adopt it.
The fuselage skin is scraped off using a curved X-Acto blade to show the internal structure. First, this structure is drawn on the plastic using a pen and then I scratch between the lines. The surface is smoothed with fine sandpaper and steel wool grade 000. The surface is checked with a metallic airbrush (of any brand). This treatment will be repeated on the wings and controls. The wings have the same thinning treatment as the fuselage, with the exception of a 0.5 to 1 inch wing root on both the lower and upper sides. Fins and flaps are removed. As well as cannon access hatches, fuel tank caps and some other access hatches. The two rods are made of plastic card almost the entire span and some ribs are made where they will show. The wings are then glued to the fuselage. The shafts of the propeller, If they are metal you can bend them slightly in case of an uneven landing. Beware some airplanes of that era had wooden propellers.
The rudder didn’t need much work as it had been thinned out before the fuselage was assembled. But the elevators are another story: as they are a part, I needed to have them more “slim”. Being lazy (translator’s note: yes, of course…), I sanded the underside (from the rod to the back end of the fixed part) and put in some 0.1mm plastic card to replace the missing material. The left side is missing the elevator, so construction had to be done. On the right side, the skin is badly damaged and the rod is visible through the holes. Then I made the moving parts: plastic cards, Eduard ribs, aluminum card… I glued a small metal tube to each surface on the first rod level and glued the surfaces to the fuselage.

Painting
Aluminum that has remained forty years under not too bad weather is something you should study in real photos. In some parts of the model the paint is still there in some places. It is a rule in these works to illuminate from the inside a work that has suffered a lot from the sun and the rain. I suggest Aluminum ¾ with white for base. Change the mixing ratios when painting and even add a bit of yellow or orange to get a warmer tone. Rust is essential. Attention, you should have different shades of rust in both acrylic and powder. Track Rust pigments are quite realistic painting effects and AK 046.

https://forum.gmodelart.com/wrecked-japanese-zero/