Mitsubishi A6M5a Rei-sen by ccoyle - Halinski/Kartonowy Arsenal - 1/33 - CARD - Allied code name "Zeke"

[ccoyle]

A Tale of Two Zeros (and a Falco)

 

Welcome to my next not-a-ship build! I'll introduce the subject of this log by way of a story. I had long been considering building one of Pawel Mistewicz's WW2 subjects published by Kartonowa Kolekcja. I have built many of Pawel's WW1 and interwar subjects, but only one WW2 subject (Brewster F2A Buffalo). His A6M2 Zero (kit #2, published in 2007) is the oldest such subject in my stash, so I was leaning toward building that kit.

 

That is, until I learned last year that Model Hobby was publishing a brand-new kit of the Reggiane Re.2000 Falco. I leapt at the opportunity to purchase the new kit and be among the first builders to complete one.

 

But it was not to be. It took four months for the Re.2000 kit to arrive. 😑 By then I had already seen a finished example online, so the possibility of being the first to finish one had vanished. Oh, well!

 

So it was back to building the Zero. Back when I ordered the Reggiane, I decided to also acquire some 3D-printed after-market parts for the Zero build, namely a Sakae radial engine and a cockpit details set.

 

Included among the parts were fourteen individual exhaust pipes, which I did not know came with the engine when I ordered it. While looking through the KK kit instructions to see where the various parts would be used, something hit me: the A6M2 did not have individual, separated exhaust pipes. Instead, the A6M2 vented its exhaust downward through a pair of pipes on either side of the fuselage. The separated pipes were introduced on the A6M5 for the purpose of giving the aircraft a little extra forward thrust by venting the exhaust gases rearward (it only marginally improved performance). The individual pipes passed through cutouts in the cowling flaps. This distinctive feature is an easy way to distinguish the A6M5 from earlier variants.

 

                       A6M2 (no cutouts)                                                                A6M5 (cutouts)

  

(Left: By Marc Grossman - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15575787 ; Right: By unlisted - 1. Historic Wings [1], Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1631577)

 

Well, it seemed a shame to have such nice after-market parts and not use them, so I did the only sensible thing: I bit the bullet and ordered an A6M5a kit from Halinski (from their Cardboard Arsenal series), along with its after-market frames, canopy, wheels, and brass gun barrels.

 

 

 

 

So that's how I ended up at this particular build subject, and it's a bit of an ambitious one. The finished model will depict the mount of Lt. (j.g.) Sadaaki Akamatsu. I'm excited to see how this one comes together, and I hope you will enjoy following along. Look for first cuts soon!

 

 

[yvesvidal]

12 hours ago, ccoyle said:

On the shelf, behind the "Zero", are these future projects in waiting? You have quite a supply there.

 

Yves

[ccoyle]

3 minutes ago, yvesvidal said:

On the shelf, behind the "Zero", are these future projects in waiting? You have quite a supply there.

 

Ha ha! And that is an 'old' photo. 🫤  The shelf situation is much worse now. I long ago crossed the nebulous border between "builder" and "collector." I may even have made another purchase recently. 😬  But hey -- it was 20% off, so I had to!

[Dave_E]

Oh yea! 🍿🥤😀

[ccoyle]

I know it's been three days since I created this build log, but despite the apparent inactivity, I did in fact start building. And here's the progress so far:

 

 

Exciting, right? If you're not familiar with Halinski kits, I'll let you in on a not-so-secret secret in the card modeling world: Halinski kits are very highly detailed -- even to the point of being described as "over-engineered" by some modelers. This one, small, partially-built assembly has eighteen parts in it.

 

To give you a good idea of how detailed Halinski kits can be, here's a birds-eye view of all the cockpit parts:

 

 

That doesn't include all of the laser-cut frames that are part of the cockpit, nor does it include the wire and/or styrene rod bits that must be made using supplied templates. Some of these parts will be replaced by 3D-printed parts, but by no means all of them. It can make for some slow progress.

 

Cheers!

[Ian_Grant]

OMG!

[ccoyle]

Slowly adding structure to the cockpit area. There's a lot of parts that need to be laminated onto various thicknesses of card, even if one uses the laser-cut frames set. The laminated parts often need to be trimmed slightly here and there to get them to fit properly, and with Halinski kits there is no margin for error -- get the frames wrong and fitting the skins afterward will be a booger.

 

And here we hit a little snag. This bulkhead location is off because there are tabs on the piece in front of it that fit into slots on the back of the bulkhead -- except if one accidentally installs the forward part upside-down, then fitting the tabs into their slots causes the bulkhead to be off by several millimeters. It's not a huge problem, since all I need to do is trim off the tabs and fit the bulkhead without them.

 

 

That's all for now!

[ccoyle]

Work on the cockpit continues slowly. Sometimes it is a "three steps forward, two steps back" kind of process. Here we have the instrument panel, which is 'glazed' with clear tape (the kit includes an unglazed option). There is a recessed instrument in the center of the panel that I had to do twice because the first time it didn't allow the panel to sit properly. There is also a series of electronic doohickies that sit below the panel, one of which you can see before its installation. The instrument is a tiny box that unfortunately does not fit into the space allowed for it, so I will need to do some surgery on that piece before proceeding.

 

[ccoyle]

I have hit a small snag while working on the 3D-printed rudder pedals. They are quite delicate, which means of course that a couple of bits have broken off and disappeared into the Carpet Monster, despite my best efforts to be careful in freeing the part from its forest of sprues.

 

In the meantime, look what arrived in the mail today!

 

You may dimly recall my disastrous attempt at building a Curtiss H75 (Hawk) in RAF colors a while back. The kit shown here is designed by the same gentleman who designed that kit. I have since found a great two-for-one build log by a Polish builder who built both models and did a fantastic job on both (as the Poles always seem to do); should I ever get around to building this kit I will definitely be looking in on that build log again. The P-47D-25 is a Halinski kit, so it is absurdly detailed, as is typical with their kits. The Kingfisher is by a designer I am not familiar with, but the kit looks very good. Something I learned about the OS2U -- when I first looked at the kit, I thought perhaps it was not actually in 1/33 scale because I expected the wings to be much larger on a two-seat aircraft. Turns out the Kingfisher's wingspan was slightly less than 36 feet, so it was indeed on the smallish side -- less than that of an F4F Wildcat.