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I have had this Tamiya kit since before it hit the shelves of the hobby shops a dozen or so years ago. Every year I go to the Chino airshow and see real Zeros flying and say to myself, “I have to build that kit…”. I went again couple weeks ago and I am following through this time.

The parts are impressive looking. Think Tamiya Lexus LFA, but in a more comprehensive airplane kit. I am building it straight Out-Of-The-Box, just to see how it goes together, and to enjoy the engineering efforts Tamiya has put into it.

I started with the engine, even though that is out of sequence according to the instructions, but it looked like a good place to start (and I needed to buy a bottle of the interior green before I could work on the cockpit). Looks like I will be doing a lot of detail/brush painting on this model…

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The interior is made up of many well detailed little parts. Most were sprayed with the green color, and then the details were brush painted.

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The fit is very good.

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While most of the inside of the fuselage will not be visible, I still went ahead and painted it all as shown in the instructions, just in case…

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I can get out my "Big Ruler" for future pictures. In the mean time to give you an idea of the size, the wing span is about 13.5 inches.

The bottom photo of the engine in post #6 and the seat picture in the middle of post #8 view very close to actual size on my monitor.

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I am building this a little different from most of the other airplane models I have made, due to the fact the kit fits exceptionally well. I was able to nearly fully finish the wings including most of the decals before mounting it to the fuselage.

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I was also pleased that my witches home brew of chemicals for a decal solvent worked well enough to apply the decals directly to the semi-flat/satin paint without any silvering and they snuggled into the recessed details nicely too.

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These planes were painted with a straight laquer which had a tendency to peel badly. And, in a tropical enviornment, the rivets themselves (steel) corroded at a different rate than the sheet metal (aluminum).

Using a wash accents these dimples, thereby allowing one to replicate that effect. IMO it can look a bit overdone, but boy does it look cool on a scale model.

G

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