This is nice work, Bryan. Too bad Tamiya didn't put a bit more into the kit, but I think they were designing it "for a price."

I have some interesting information about airplanes in the South Pacific that I've come across recently while researching my newest book - I'm writing "the Cactus Air Force" that my friend and mentor Eric Hammel was working on before he passed last summer. I've become the owner/administrator/whatever of 5GB of material he had collected, mostly interviews with the people who were there, going back to an interview he did with then-Admiral Turner Caldwell in 1961 (I wonder if the Admiral knew he was being interviewed by a 16 year old? Eric got going early). There's all the "names" one knows, but more interesting are the names I don't know - all the then-junior officers he interviewed. And doing them 50 years ago, they were young enough to remember things they would have later forgotten to ever mention. Anyway, in one interview I read this past week with a then-junior wingman 2nd Lieutenant, the guy mentions that "the Jap airplanes all looked new..." And then there's some back and forth about how long airplanes lasted, and he makes a comment that "there at Henderson, an airplane that had been there three weeks was old." The same is probably true about the Japanese. This fits with a recent conversation I had with Colonel Ralph Wetterhahn. He was on Guadalcanal last summer doing research for a new book. He actually found Pug Southerland's F4F-4 "F-15"! He's also a modeler, as well as a career fighter pilot, and he mentioned that with both US and Japanese airplanes he found in the jungle, that once he wiped away the dust and the patina of age, the thing that surprised him was they all had good paint. He said the paint didn't even look as weathered as the F-4s he flew in 8th TFW in Vietnam. (this also fits with what @lgardner wrote in his post on Japanese paint a while back)

I'm now convinced that we have likely been "overdoing" our South Pacific weathering. These airplanes just hadn't been around a long time. Yes, they got covered with oil and mud and such, operating from the fields they were on, but they were not beat to death. The really weathered look of Japanese airplanes is from photos taken of wrecks that had been lying out on airfields for months if not years before an Allied photographer happened by. But here is information from a technically-knowledgeable researcher who has literally been "hands on" with the subject, and the testimony of a guy talking only 20 years after the event, mentioning the enemy airplanes "looked new." Information to be considered.

And yeah, the Japanese airplanes that arrived with unpainted surfaces and got painted "in the field" are a different topic. Everybody's airplanes that got painted without primer looked terrible real quick with the weather out there. Lamar Gillet, who was in the 17th Pursuit Squadron in the Philippines when the war started, told me that the P-35As they had that were unpainted aluminum that they painted olive drab before the war looked like they had "been through a war" after the first time they got flown through a Philippines rain storm.

Figuring out paint - the never-ending topic of research. 🙂

Bryan, @plasticslave
Thank you for posting this finished model for us to enjoy. I was wondering about this particular build you started about a week ago, when I started taking another peek at the dual 1/48 scale Tamiya G4M kits that I also have started... Speaking of them, be on the look out for them to merge over here to the Empire of Japan very soon, along with the 5 accompanying A6M's that I also have underway as part of the Yamamoto intercept mission build.

I like how you have finished your plane. It looks exceptional to me. I especially like how you have chipped the paint on your Betty. What our friend Tom Cleaver @tcinla
has written is spot on. The Japanese paints were actually very good, and not subject to oxidation or excessive peeling if they were applied properly.

Here are the key words. "If they were applied properly"... Most of the early G4M's left the Mitsubishi factory in a natural metal finish. They were only painted where the Hinomarus were, and the anti glare reflective panels on the engine cowlings / nacelles, and just ahead of the cockpit area. The remaining portion of the plane was left in natural metal. Of course the fabric covered controls were painted with "dope" to not only tighten and seal the fabric, but to also protect the interior structure from corrosion by keeping the water from passing through the fabric.

Other than that they were bare metal. Here you can see a few "Betty" planes at the Yokosuka Japanese air depot shortly after the War ended. This is why the propellers are off. (They followed MacArthur's orders). Notice how badly chipped the paint is. Also notice how good the paint is on the aircraft that were painted at the factory... Take a good look at the "Irving" in the foreground. It is a factory painted example.

The reason why it so so bad, is simple. The paint was applied in the field as Tom Cleaver stated. These aircraft were most likely covered in a thin film of engine oil and hydraulic fluids, dirt and dust. Any radial engine aircraft leaks oil. You can't stop this from happening, even on today's radial engines.

In order to properly prep a metal surface for painting, it needs to be thoroughly cleaned and degreased. If it is not, the paint will not adhere properly...

Cleaning an aircraft in the jungle, while watching out closely for a group of B-25's to strafe you, is most likely not going to be done very thoroughly. Keep in mind that supplies, such as cleaners were probably not as important as food, ammunition and fuel... Chances are also likely they used good old gasoline as a degreaser / cleaner. It works good in this capacity... trust me. They were likely to keep the gasoline in the vehicles and aircraft where it was more useful...so cleaning the airframe was not a priority.

Thank you very much for posting up these completed pictures for us to enjoy. Please post your model in the headlines section when you have the time.

I sincerely thank you for participating in our Empire of Japan group.

Hello again Colin. @coling
I did some color research on my dual 1/48 scale Tamiya G4M builds before I started the "Yamamoto" project. I was originally under the impression that the G4M was delivered with the underside painted in light gray. The more I dug into this, the more I uncovered, and found out these "early" Mitsubishi G4M-1 planes were delivered in bare metal. They later received camouflage paint at repair depots or even at the unit level. This is only for the "Betty" bomber, and doesn't apply to the Zero.

Here are a few “screenshots” that I took with my phone a few minutes ago. There are numerous other websites that mentioned how the early built version of the Betty bomber was delivered exactly as I described in my previous post.

Here is a build of a model on Modeling Madness where the article talks about it.

The website "History Net" has mentioned it.

Even Hasegawa mentions the use of "Silver" on the undersides on this 1/72 scale kit...

However Tamiya states the underside colors were "Silver or Gray" in color on my kit decal marking instructions.

For me, the best information comes directly from the Jaircraft.com website, where they mention it as being truthful. Here's a little snip of a discussion exactly on the subject.

So if you happen to see a model of the Betty and it is painted gray versus silver or aluminum color, there's a good possibility it could be painted incorrectly.

Notice I didn't say it was definitely wrong... as these words can come back to haunt you later as more research on the subject is being done. To be fair to anyone who has painted their plane using light gray, it is next to impossible to determine a bare metal surface from one that has been painted light gray.

There is another good website for Japanese aircraft, and it is called Aviation of Japan.

Hope this helps to clear up any misunderstandings.

You did a fantastic job with your N1K model. It looks as if you were able to shrink down a full sized plane to 1/32 scale. Thanks again for sharing it with us.

Hello Colin, @coling
You did not offend me. Please don't think that you did. I hope that I didn't cause you or anyone else any grief by posting this information on the underside colors. In the end this is supposed to be a hobby and fun.
Brian's model does look very good. As do yours... I can tell you that I have more than one plane in my display case that is painted wrong. I call it my learning curve.

I seem to remember a color picture of Kanno's plane that I thought was correct for so many years... the one that I posted in your magnificent N1K2 build journal ... 😉

Then you and our good friend Erik mentioned how it seemed to be photo shopped... (and it was) This was something that I never caught before. So I am the last one to cast stones.

No harm no foul. It's all good. 🙂

@lgardner - that is a really important shot of the G4Ms. Those all appear to be late war G4M2s. Interestingly, these airplanes probably began like the G4M2s on the assembly line in the attached photo, where they're painted in the factory. I would say this "before" and your "after" photo demonstrate the hard use these airplanes got after 1943. Also, the factory shot looks (to me) like the lower surface is unpainted metal. If that's the case, that's how the paint weathered so fast, the weathering could work from the unpainted lower surfaces.

I'm also attaching a photo a early-war G4M1s of the Kanoya Air Group. Their paint seems to conform to early war good paint.

Researching paint! Fun fun fun. 🙂

2 attached images. Click to enlarge.

@fiveten: you may be on to something. Thin primer due to shortages, thin paint for the same reason only on the upper surfaces, result - ragged look.

well - I kinda got wrapped up in the weeds of the paint discussion - very interesting. But meanwhile, there sits a beautifully done, well-worn, flying cigar! Nicely done!