Im building 1/48 IJN rufe. I want to paint it lt. jap gray alover and do the green molt or molted finish on the topside,but im not sure if there were any like this. All pics i find r in bk/wht for the most part.They all seem too be lt. jap gray allover or with the jap dark green top surface.Ive seen other jap aircraft in the south pasific painted like this molted look(somewhat like the german camo jobs) but not the rufe . would this be wrong? any help would be great thanks. Paul L.
I think they tried to mimick scrubs, grass and plants with the blotched camo. And , the Rufe being a water plane, didn’t need such a camo…simply there are is no such vegetation on the water! [:)]
I’m a big fan of floatie thingies [whstl]…as most everyone knows already…I built my Rufe a couple of years ago…I did research back then and all I found was green or grey top sides. Now they did weather heavily since they were exposed to the salt air and water. What I also found and this is just my theory, is that most mottled japanese planes were predominately IJA most Navy were solid colors…again not all cause I have seen IJN mottled, just my theory.
here’s mine…I painted it all grey(my own mix) then IJN green and then weathered it by rubbing away the green to expose the grey.
Good Luck…lets see some pics as you are building!
GRL
makes sense to me.thanks for responding. Paul
Im an old gearhead, not to sure about postin pics. and all that button pushin stuff.just another thing i need to work on . PL
One thing to think about when building a Rufe is that the Japanese used a red primer for seaplanes. So a Rufe with chipped paint would show red primer, not bare aluminimum.
all the images I found when doing my research showed light tone in the worn areas…didnt look like primer red to me…
Borg is right, they used red primer on Zeros BUT I don’t know if it was done on Nakajima or Mitsubishi build planes.
( it’s also mentioned in the Osprey book modelling the Mitsubishi A6M Zero.)
And if I am correct, it’s also seen on some pics on this site… ( I’m not sure I looked at the pics a while ago, and it’s to much work to do it again just for this reply…)
www10.ocn.ne.jp/~a6m232
Carsanab, that’s a great looking Rufe.
Swanny has a really good piece on this subject: www.swannysmodels.com/JapaneseWeathering.html
This is really interesting. All the pictures I have seen of Japanese weathered aircraft display the metal color under the topcoat.
My remark about the red primer only refers to navy planes. Here is a qoute from Swanny’s article: " This new glossy gray-green scheme was factory-applied with state-of-the-art techniques over a red brown primer, and it proved to be extremely resistant. No plane so painted is likely to exhibit any extensive peeling, even under harsh conditions. There is one photo of a much used Mitsubishi F1M2 in a later period with the green camouflage paint of the upper surface well worn (though not really peeling), and with the central float almost stripped of green paint by the abrasion of the sea, and which still retains a nominal matted coat of the gray-green paint." furthermore, interpreting a colour from a black and white photograph is very difficult. Depending on the chemical formula used colours may come out differently. And dark colors may appear light (and the other way around) The B&W photo’s from the 1930 and 40’s are not always comparible with what was use later in the century.
thanks to all for your input on the rufe.so much reserch for a model but I think its part of the fun checkin out all the cool camo jobs. Rufe and 1/350 Yamato on the bench! Paul
I will root through all the Rufe pics I gathered when researching my Aleutian Rufe; since I was specifically interested in that theater, all the ones I turned up were overall gray or green over gray. The “gray,” of course, being subject to much debate, general concensus now that it is more of a caramel color, which is what I went with to replicate the Nakajima Amber Gray (Ame-iro).
Here’s a link to my build: http://myplace.frontier.com/~monty.fowler/Models2/a6m2n_rufe.htm since I can’t post pics in here yet due to a forum software glitch.