This is my recently completed Tamiya 1/48 A6M2 Zero.  It was built mostly OOB with the addition of homemade seatbelts fabricated from lead foil from an expensive liquor bottle.  I also sanded the seat to make it thinner.  The fit of the wing to the fuselage was not great, so I inserted various short sections of scrap sprue to "raise" the upper wing surface to meet the wing root.  I also inserted a spreader between the fuselage halves to spread them out and fill in the gaps at the wing root.  I originally painted it with Gunze Sangyo colors, and used the kit decals.  After a coat of Gunze clear gloss, I did my usual weathering and prepared it for the final flat coat.  This is where disaster struck!

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Evidently, the gloss wasn't quite dry so the flat coat pooled up on it and left horrible cracks in it.  Repeated thin layers of flat only worsened the problem.  I ended up stripping all of the paint, decals, and clear coats off of it with Isopropyl alcohol and a worn out toothbrush.  All of the panel lines had to be cleaned out individually and most of the filled seams had to be re-done.  After a week or so of this tedious work, I was ready to paint again.  I used a dark brown preshade, and then started building up the paint.  This time, I made masks and airbrushed the hinomarus as the decals were giving me fits trying to conform to some of the little bumps on the wings.  As for replacement markings, I had originally used the kit supplied ones for Saburo Sakai's aircraft.  Luckily, a friend had an extra set of markings from an old Aeromaster set (Thanks Mike!) that were the same as I had originally intended to use, and graciously mailed them to me so I could finish the project.  I used Polly Scale gloss and flat this time, baking it inside a cardboard box at 115 degrees for an hour or two to help the coats cure.  I am very happy with the finished result.  Thanks for checking it out!

Frank