Woody, I don't know that there's rebuttle to be made so much as clarification, and I'm sorry for any lack of clarity on my part. Jeremy built an A6M3 Type 32, which afaik was still painted as not just a naval a/c but specifically as a carrier a/c. As such it would have had a dull red primer coat, the ameiro over-all coat, and then the dark green camouflage hand applied (possibly sprayed in whole or part?). Also, he referenced that famous photo of Nishizawa's Reisen which, as far as I can see, has no "chipping," only places where the dark green was thinly applied or the painter took a "holiday." What I was trying to suggest to Jeremy is that he had done a very nice job of depicting the areas at the wing root where the pilot and ground crew scraped away the paint layers with their boots - which doesn't show in the photo, but that he didn't need to worry about adding more "chipping" elsewhere except maybe at the cowl fasteners and panel lines.
Maybe I should have been clearer about what I see as the difference between "chipping" due to poor paint quality and application, and "scraping" due to friction, weathering, and wear. My bad.
As for Raiden and Shiden, they were never intended to be carrier-based a/c, so I doubt - I do not KNOW - that they had the surface preparation that Reisen had up to the last couple of years of the war. Nevertheless, the Kyofu floatplane progenitor of the Shiden did receive excellent surface preparation. The only photos I know of showing extensive exposed metal on a Kyofu are photos of derelict planes, not in-service a/c. In looking through web photos of early Shiden, most of them show little to no chipping (as I use the term) even when they show scraping wear at the wing roots. But then, these were not Mitsubishi a/c, and I don't know what surface preparation Kawanishi used or if/when that changed during the Shiden production.
Raiden look to me to fall in the same category of never being intended for carrier operations, so probably never getting the careful surface preparation of the early Reisen. But again, the prototypes and early production Raiden look to me to have had substantially better paint jobs than later a/c, and again, the most obvious areas of exposed metal was from scraping at the wing roots rather than chipping from a poor paint job. That chipping problem did become more noticeable for Raiden, as it did for Shiden and Reisen, later in the war.
One thing that has interested/bothered me is that many late-war Japanese a/c had specific panels that always lost paint, whether by chipping or scraping, even while adjacent panels kept their paint. It's like a cottage supplier for that one panel slapped on a coat of house paint while the manufacturer did a much better job with an industrial strength product. This is particularly apparent on most Hayate, but late in the was it also occurred on Reisen and Raiden.
As for the accuracy of hobby paints, all I was trying to say was that the Mitsubishi and Nakajima hobby undersurface grays don't look at all like the undersurface gray used by most restorations in museums that specifically mention that they based their colors on paint samples from the original a/c. Those museum restorations use a white-ish gray that, going through my memories of hobby paints, is closest to the very old Poly-S light gray - I think they called it Japanese Army/Navy Light Gray, but don't bet on that.
I also don't see that white-ish gray on any of the color charts the experts have found or devised recently.
I'm using the last of my 30 year-old AeroMaster paints now on Hasegawa's A6M7, I've got White Ensign (for color samples, as I don't use non-acrylics), AK, Vallejo, Tamiya (color samples only), Gunze Mr. Hobby, and a few bottles of others, here and there. I occasionally blend special purpose colors, but otherwise I'll use a name brand that matches closely enough the experts' guidance and suits my mood for a specific build.
I have and highly recommend Millman's Combat Colours No 9 The Mitsubishi Zero and his for-sale PDF on the J2M, and Toews's Notes on the Tamiya A6M5 (available for free on-line). I've collected over the years Thorpe's books, the Aero Detail series, as well as lots of other Japanese publications I can't read but learn from the photos. I've seen many of the US restorations and the D4Y at the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo. This is not to say I'm claiming to be any sort of expert. I'll die soon enough with more questions than answers. The historian in me wishes those military people had kept and left intact better records and that some critical restoration work didn't get contracted to the lowest bidder.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts and insights, Woody. Hope you get to build many enjoyable models.
