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1/32 Zoukei-Mura Ta152H-0 White 7


Thunnus

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Thanks so much guys!  I very much appreciate the comments and positive vibes!

 

5 hours ago, Kais said:

John,
I am thoroughly enjoying your treatment of the Tank. What a treat to observe!
I have the same boxing here. Watching your struggles motivated me to start trial fitting much of kit in an attempt to find the root of the evils which befell you.
Without coming across as a smart aleck, I believe I've found the cause, and a fix. What seems to be going on is tolerance stacking.
The wing spar out board of the engine pickup mounts appears to be approximately 1.5 to 2mm too long ( .75 to 1mm each side).This gives you the gaps you experienced.
The fix is to saw through the spar and re-glue. The kerf of about .7 mm each side results in a noticeabley better fit on all the other joins. 
In addition to taking .7mm a side from the front spar you will need to remove the same from the rear spar pick ups which project from under the cockpit.
.............
I realise this is cold comfort to you (unless you're building another tank), but perhaps others might find it useful.

 

Oh man... this is awesome!  If you have a blueprint to fix some of the fit issues that I experienced, I am thoroughly impressed!    I hope that others can take your hints and make their builds turn out better!  Thank you so much for sharing that!

 

The port cross is still a bit wonky.  I use this repair as an opportunity to replace with a slightly smaller cross.
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I wasn't quite happy with the upper fuselage camo pattern.  I had a difficult time correlating what I was seeing in photos of White 7 to known color profiles and schematics.  I was using a drawing in Hitchcock's Ta152H book as a basic painting guide.  It is representative of the Ta152H-0 and seemed to be based on the photos of 150003.
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However, it did not seem to correspond to this recent photo of 150007...
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My initial painting efforts were an attempt to marry the two images and resulted in some awkward transitions. As I looked closer, I realized that the fuselage pattern  of 150007 could be an inverse of the Hitchcock drawing.  This made some sort of sense to me and so I went with that idea.

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Always good work, and I appreciate your ability to go back and fix things.  Too often, I notice a mistake after it's done, and am too lazy to fix it.

 

Don't know why I just thought of this, but I'm sure the Z-M Concept Note on the Ta would include a lot of tips and fixes. I know it helped a lot when I did their Shinden, since it includes a step-by-step build with fixes and help.

 

 

 

Matt 

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It's a pain to go back and re-do but sometimes that voice in the back of my head won't shut up!


I got a couple of things done... the upper wing crosses were redone.  They were re-sized to 900mm instead of the 1000mm crosses that my references state.  Seems to fit the wing better.  Also, I got the fuselage mottling done.  This is actually my second attempt as the first was way too heavy.  Light wisps of paint seemed to work best.  Most of the mottling was done with the darker RLM 83 color but a few RLM 82 spots were added randomly.

 

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Seems as though I've had a lot of free time today.  So I've spent most of the time on the modeling bench.  I started on the fuselage markings.  This is the tail end of the red and yellow unit ID band of  JG301 with the green Gruppe bar.
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Pulling off all of the masking shows the finished band.  Note that I've left the horizontal stablizers detachable so it's easier to paint around the tail.
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Very small WNr codes for the tail printed from the Silhouette Portrait...
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The fusleage crosses, tail swastika and WNr codes are done.
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I'll let this dry and then I'll try the painted out CW+CG codes.
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Thanks Kevin!

 

I pretty much spent the whole day at the work bench and have finished all of the masked markings with this update.  The CW+CG codes are provided as rough-edged decals on the Eagle Cals decal sheet.  I just roughly traced them in AutoCAD and produced masks.  For some reason, Eagle Cal provided two sets of "CW" and "C" but no "CG" so I made one.  I didn't want a totally hard edge on these so I used little balls of Blue Tack to suspend them slightly off the model's surface.
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Didn't really care for uniform spacing... some edges were closer and even touching... sloppy spacing should equal a more natural result.
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I used the Mr Hobby Aqueous version of RLM 76 with a dash of RLM 75 for the painted-out markings.
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The result is subtle but doesn't stand out too much.
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After that, the white 7's get added.  I'm gonna reinforce the "G" on the port side and also take of our that dark spot aft of the red/yellow band.  That is a scratchmark that I pre-treated with Neutral Grey.
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With the last of the painted markings, I removed the masks around the exhausts.  The paint stage is over and I'll be moving on to the decals after I seal her up with a gloss coat.  Here is what the Tank fighter looks like before the decals are applied.

 

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