Japanese Bomber "Rita" - Orange Finish??

thx much for that. will certainly be doing the orange finish. Safe to say that a basic flat orange would be close?

thx - Craig

It was also a bottom side color for training aircraft, I seem to recall

- there's another orange torpedo bomber kit out there, and that one's a trainer, if I remember...I forget which aircraft. I believe gloss or semi-gloss would be proper.

cool. thanx. Even I can't screw up a one color paint job.

Craig

Some trainers were overall orange such as the Willow. LS even pressed them in orange plastic!

Tom

...

I had just gotten back into modeling after college when this kit came out. The orange is for protype flight test aircraft. I guess good visibility of what its doing and easy to find the wreckage when something goes wrong. They only built 4, and one was shipped to the US for test after the war. Back then the orange was considered the correct scheme for an actual aircraft, it never went operational with the Navy, - the Green and gray was considered a Luft 46 type model although that term hadn't been coined yet. Two of the big flying boat kits came out at the same time. They were Green and Gray operationally. There's a interesting story about the Emily. Somebody published a picture of a Pink Emily disabled and captured in a harbor. Hey why not we had desert pink in North Africa. Some guys actually build one. Then one of the guys from the US photo group writes in he remembers the picture - his group took it. They screwed up the developing chemicals and instead of Green - it looked pink. The picture resurfaced severeal times, and this guy kind of made a hobby out of trying to kill it.

Val Kraut

Also so that trigger-happy pilots and AA gunners wouldn't mistake it for a American aircraft.

Pat

this is an old Hasegawa kit. Do you have a release date on it? Crude instructions and interesting english translations. came with two tubes of glue too.

Craig

yup. it's in the restore before death pile.

I just recently sold a Matchbox Zero that had a training scheme as optional. The underside was done in orange. Way back when I first bought my Rita (in an AMT boxing) I used Pactra's Camouflage Colours' Terra Cotta. IIRC, it was wearing that scheme when it migrated out to the desert to 'someone' a couple of years back. Looked pretty orange but in a toned-down way.

Bill Banaszak, MFE Sr.

As I said elsewhere, mine came in an AMT box and I built it shortly after getting married. That dates back to '69-'70. The Hasegawa boxing may suggest a bit earlier.

Bill Banaszak, MFE Sr.

this is an old Hasegawa kit. Do you have a release date on it? Crude instructions and interesting english translations. came with two tubes of glue too.

I graduated in 1967, and found a Hobby shop named Womrath's in Hempstead Long Island through an official paints add. Womrath's was a book store that started importing Japanese kits direct. Saturday morning there'd be moedelers there from places like New England and Philadelphia that drove in because nobody else had this stuff. This was one of the earlier kits I bought so probably 1968. Instructiuon sheets were fun in those days - "Make upon the face a flesh color" It's still happening today - box art from Trumpeter - Panzerwagen vol 1 (Volume 1 like a book instead of variation 1) or Me-109 flown by Mr.Adolf Gallant (hey wasn't tis guy an officer). Anyway I did the Rita in imagined Navy Camo and ended messing it up really bad with one of my first attempts at weathering. Unfortunately fire crackers were illegal by then so it went in the junk. I still have the original Emily and another flying boat. I was saving building them until I could do realistic water, materials were sort of limited at the time. I remember one guy who made some really nice water out of a curdled milk product. Then something started growing on it and he had the most realistic grass imagineable until the stuff died.

Val Kraut