Peter's Wirraway V Ki-43-I Oscar

[smeg1959]

And just to make us Aussies really jealous, a collection of CAC aircraft in 1/72 from a modeller in Uruguay ...

[pbhawkin]

A pity a number of pictures have been removed.

Anyway, here are some shots of the Oscar masked and ready for spraying with hairspray:

And the JA Green camo applied:

And after being chipped with a wet material pot scrubber and scalpel:

I have repainted the control surfaces the light Grey they should be.

[pbhawkin]

Ok I am calling the Oscar finished.
I am still unsure if the fabric surfaces were Grey or just a faded green colour?
I guessed that there was no Yellow leading edge ID colour due to time frame.
I left the drop tanks on but guess they would not have been present.

I am just waiting on decals to add the aircraft code ('D') to the Wirraway and then that is finished too.

[Wege]

Peter... rather than the 'aotake' for the wheel wells, I would have thought they were more a puke-yellow/green colour?

and as other comment..
AWESOME!

[cowleyi]

Yes, Peter that is excellent work. Thanks for your efforts, Another top shelf job

Ian

[pbhawkin]

Wege, I think Aotake is correct (still not sure if I should over paint the fabric Grey control surfaces on the Oscar with a thinned shade of the same paint as used on the rest of the plane?).

Anyway, here is the Wirraway finished. I didn't put the nose artwork on as it seems this was added after the shooting down of the Oscar.

[Ryan B.]

Boy, you've got to be proud to have that in your collection!

[smeg1959]

Sorry for the VERY late feedback on this pairing. Great work, Peter. The Wirraway has come up a treat and the weathering on the Oscar matches nicely with several photos I've seen of some IJN/IJA aircraft.

In doing the decal artwork and profiles for several Wirraways, I've read a number of accounts of Archer's reporting that he'd downed a Japanese fighter. The misnomer that it was a Zero actually came from Archer himself. It wasn't until much later that it was confirmed that the victim had been a Ki-43 of the 11th Sentai. I probably could be a tad cheeky here and point out that your Wirraway protrays the aircraft AFTER the kill, as indicated by the small Rising Sun emblem aft of the machine gun bulges. What I also find interesting about this particular aircraft is the noseart that appeared near the cowling a short time later. There seem to be two distinct versions.

The first looks like some form of dragon with spoked wheels (as depicted in both profiles on Wings Palette), whilst the second is a god-knows-what wearing torn shorts and an ARP helmet (as per these photos on the ADF Serials forum). In doing artwork for this aircraft, I've gone with the latter as it clearly appears on a wartime photo of Archer's aircraft (see below). This is supported by the fact that the Australian War Memorial in Canberra restored A20-103 and embellished it with this bizarre creature.

[pbhawkin]

Here are two pictures of the plane's artwork from the post war rebuild.

post-2-1216720487.jpg (32.4 KiB) Viewed 6327 times

I am suspicious about the 'dragon on wheels' as I think that is just someone's "best guess' as to what the artwork is.