Not A Zero Part 2 Meeting my Demons

So having decided to chose the Ki 44 Shoki (Demon Queller) as my first NAZ I ordered six from Armaments in Miniature. As always they arrived in the UK a week or so later (cant praise AIM enough for their service) and then spent the traditional couple of months sat in my "to do" pile until I became motivated, which was last week.

First job was to clean them up - which took very little time as there was minimal flash. Slightly more work was involved in removing the mounting screw - a feature of AIM models, and replacing it with a Hawk Wargames "Widget". This only takes a minute or so to be fair but I always worry I will snap or break something, which is stupid as I must have done this 30+ times now without incident. Lastly I masked the widget with tape to protect it from errant paint, and went to think about undercoats.

The undercoat may or may not have been important. I tend to undercoat planes white, but the Ki44s often sported a rather American looking all metal finish. That is WAAAY out of my comfort zone but the chaps at Asgard Wargaming and on line suggested using either a grey or black undercoat - so I went with grey. I then blocked the base colours on which is very easy as there are only a couple - overall a chrome silver from Vallejo which is part of their Air range but I applied with a brush as I couldnt be ars*d to set the airbrush up and clean it afterwards - those Vallejo metalics are excellent btw. I used a thinned down Vallejo black ink to mark out the panel lines then put the black anti glare markings and the base blue on the canopies and retired for the evening feeling a little underwhelmed with the results. Hand painting the panel lines is always a bit of a job but it is usually worth it, but on these I just didn't think it was working. Ah well..

Next morning dawned bright and early and I rose with the lark. Not being able to get back to sleep I decided to make more progress and tidied up the basic blocking, panel lines,  cannons, canopies, spinners and leading edges. After the previous night's Doldrums I found the models looked much better in the early morning light.

So now on to the final session. After Tea (the traditional Northern name for the meal Southerners call dinner for reasons I don't understand) Mrs is happy to watch Emmerdale on TV so I head on up to the loft to get the decals done. In this case these are from Misc Minis and represent the 70th Sentai, a famous Shoki Squadron particularly noted for it's actions against B29 Super-fortress raids in the last part of the war. The decals were a bit fiddly. MiscMinis print their decals on a single sheet rather than as individual decals, so you need to carefully cut around each of these. I use decaset and decasol but this time the decal film seemed a little heavier than usual and for some reason it was a but fiddly. The end result is however well worth it. I think on balance if Warlord do a suitable decal set I would use them simply because each decal is separate and needs less work, but as that will only apply to the mainstream I don't see me moving away from MiscMinis any time soon.

So here they are, ready to defend the Home Islands and the Emperor:

I usually matt varnish, mainly out of habit, but I'm contemplating leaving them in gloss  - thoughts?

Part 3 will hopefully be a report on their first try out... watch this space