I am not going to put to much detail into this page. There is a contest coming up in 2 weeks and I thought I would try and build a model in time for it. I chose the Tamiya Zero because it looked like a nice little model with modern features that would make it easy to build in a short time. I was going to build my little Revel Wildcat from the 60s but after examining the parts is seemed like a daunting challenge to get it to look good - plus I lost one of the landing gear parts down the sink when I was cleaning the sprues.

To get the weathering of the finish that was common to Japanese planes during the war I decided to try the hairspray method. I had never done this before and thought it would be a good test for future builds. I got everything ready, painted a nice Alclad II Aluminum base coat, let everything dry sufficiently and as I was painting the green I realized that I had forgot to add the hairspray coat to the model :( Since I was using Tamiya acrylic and it comes off with Windex I resorted to scrubbing the green off with a stiff brush. The Alclad underneath would not come off with windex so I was able to make it look ok. It is not great but it is not bad. I did remember to add hairspray to the cowling and the chipping looks quite nice if I do say so myself.

So here are a few pictures of my latest creation.

And here are the final pictures. Total build time just under 2 weeks.