With minimal fuss we are now at the painting stage.
Painting
First thing to do is primer everything and for this I used my default Tamiya Fine Grey Primer (use the white version if you are using bright colours such as reds and yellows). I added some Alclad Aluminium followed by Zinc Chromate around areas that I would weather later on in the build. I would keep minimal as reference pictures showed these aircraft with far less weathering than those that were land based.
Next was the overall Dark Sea Blue and once dry the major markings were added using the Montex masks. This can be quite time consuming when compared to decals but the finish is far superior and they can be weathered a lot better than decals.
Weathering
As I said earlier I wanted to keep the weathering to a minimum but I definitely didn’t want a ‘pristine’ airframe. What I could see from the reference pictures that I could find was the inboard wing area and areas around the hand/foot recess got the paint worn away by the pilot and the ground crews. The area around the wing fold strut tended to be chipped and the paint on the wing leading edges was sometimes worn away to the primer or bare metal.
I also quite regularly saw extensive exhaust along the aircraft belly and cordite staining at the gun ports. Finally, the areas around the fuel caps tended to be stained, especially in front of the cockpit, where the crews had had fuel spills during refuelling. Whilst talking of this area of the airframe the white tape around here was to stop leaking fuel/lubricant from spreading onto the canopy and obscuring the pilot’s view. Reference photos show lots of combinations of this tape depending on the airframe and the time the photo was taken and in quite a few cases there is no tape at all or it could be black rather than white so it’s not obvious.
Therefore, check your references or if there are no photos, take an educated guess based on other similar airframes at the same time.
Even though I had an aftermarket engine I decided to make up the kit engine with the rear vents closed and the centre cowlings glued in place. The idea here was I could interchange it with the resin one that would have the engine on show. I did add some ignition wires from lead wire and spark plugs from brass tube. I attached the six exhaust stubs to the fuselage engine bulkhead and DID NOT glue them to the kit engine otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to swap round the engine assemblies later on. I’ll show the construction of the resin engine later on as it proved to be more of a complex job then I had expected.
