This is the 15th and final entry into my Year of the Axis build.

Let me just state this right up front - this kit is one of the best that I've ever built, challenging even Tamiya's fantastic P-47 and F4U kits.  It shares a lot of similarities with Tamiya's 1/32 A6M5 kit that I built earlier this year, but I don't believe it's necessarily a simple scaled-down version of its larger brother.

My wife got this kit for me when it was first released back in 2008 or thereabouts, and added the "detail-up" set that is available for this kit.  The "detail-up" set includes gun barrels and pitot tube, and wheel chokes as well.  The kit also includes some great looking pilot figures, a couple of Samurai swords, but I elected not to build any of those given how pitiful I am with figures in general, and especially in this scale.  (They come off looking like rejects from some zombi flick).

Paints are Tamiya for the cockpit with Vallejo in the wheel wells and full exterior.  I weathered with a silver prisma pencil, a Flory dark dirt wash, and various Tamiya weathering compounds.  Markings are from the kit's decal sheet (except for the Hinomarus on the underside of the wings, which I realized after the fact Tamiya included only one set for this kit, and I had already used them for the Monogram A6M5 I built alongside this one - so I scrounged my spares box and found left-over decals from Tamiya's J2M "Jack" that I built a long time ago).

So that's it for me this year.  I'm not sure how long it'll be before I have much desire to tackle another Luftwaffe splinter scheme or do any of the mottling/splotching that seemed to be common among Axis aircraft.  Longing for a simple tri-color USN scheme right about now ...