April/May A6M-2 Zero Update | AirCorps Aviation

Texas Flying Legend’s Museum
by Chuck Cravens

Update

The renovation of the A6M-2b Zero, Last Samurai, is accelerating as everything comes together. We will revisit the replica fuselage guns, now completed and ready for final finish. We will also see skins being made and the structure work pretty much completed.

The last section of the update will show skins going on the structure, but the first items are the guns and tail hook.

Guns and Tail Hook

Machined parts for the replica Type 97 fuselage guns look ready for assembly.

A machine gun replica takes on its final shape in this image.

Assembly of the machine gun is more complete here.

The long lever is the cocking lever. Because the back of the receivers were inside the cockpit, the pilot could manually charge the chambers with the lever. It will have a black knob on the end when completely finished.

The butt end of the receiver is constructed to house modern comm equipment.

This assembly is part of the tail hook and the darker part is the actuating arm.

This is how it looks assembled onto the tail hook.

Here we can see the actual hook part of the assembly that would engage the arresting cable on a carrier.

Skins

One of the vertical stabilizer skins is ready to go.

Once the skins have been drilled and dimpled , the inside surfaces are given a coat of protective paint.

The original Japanese protective coating was called aotake and was considered by many to be superior in protective qualities to our zinc chromate primers. The fact that Japanese wrecks in jungle areas frequently exhibit less corrosion than Allied wrecks bears this out. Thepaint used here is a modern epoxy colored to match the unique hue of aotake.