Well, you know I had a much smaller arf Zero (OK Models 45 size Zero) that had over 800 hours of hard flying time on it, same Saito .56 throughout its life too. Every year it got more oil soaked (oil smoke) heavier, and dinged from use but also looked more and more realistic. In all those years it became more and more of a fixture at the field and really helped get others in the club excited about warbirds, especially with good looking and flying arfs being so common these days. The challenge for me was trying to see just how long I could keep it going and how major damage could be repaired. It became a puzzle to solve (literally at times). I learned a lot from others at the field and from just plain experimenting on my own. In its last season (2007) I was flying it with the wing tip chewed up from another buddies prop. It flew okay but needed a bit of trim! A month later a newer pilot flying a hanger 9 Spit in our group ran into me at 300ft, cutting my tail feathers off and destroying both planes. The wood was just too oil soaked to take any glue and was just breaking up into granules as you rubbed it between fingers. After seeing how pervasive the oil had been on that model which was made of balsa formers and foam sheeting with a printed vinyl covering it was time for a new plane and I told myself it was going to be all glass. That's when another buddy in the group said he had just gotten a World Models 60 size Zero at a swap shop from a guy who hacked it together as an electric. It was rough (wing halves were not even at the root!) but Curt gave it to me and I started to cut it up and heat the epoxy free at the center. Prying and scrapping the soft epoxy I was able to get all the individual pieces free and clean and reassembled. The modes came from there, all small and relatively simple operations in their individual execution but they add up as a whole. I think anyone can do this, and better probably too, if you look at it that way. Small, individual projects.

Your Zero looks good and I'm sure it looks GREAT on a low, fast flyby! Besides you can alway add detail as you like along the way....

Damn I love those summer afternoons flying formation with my buddies!

Set 1 pics of the Okay models Zero 800+ flying hours!
Set 2 World Models Zero...The tweaking began here....