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Japanese aircraft data plate - Navy?


Bob Hudson
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I looked up some of these online, and this seems similar to one I saw ID'ed as being from a Zero, but since every piece of metal brought home by Pacific War vets is seemingly called "a Zero part" I'm sceptical.

 

joplate.jpg

 

 

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Bob,

It is navy marked with the Tokyo arsenal inspection mark, cherry blossom stamp and what appears to be a 3 diamonds stamp for Mitsubishi . No date stamping. However, the main frame plate would have A6M--- on it for a Zero. What I see on the 2nd line down is Type 1 Land .....I can't read all of it. It looks aircraft, but for what I'm not sure....Mitsubishi made so much for the military it could also be for some other piece of equipment or part in a plane. This may be of some help....I hope.

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Dad made some bracelets he made from metal a wrecked Japanese plane on Saipan, if I remember correctly. I asked him once what kind of plane it was. He said it was a Zero. All Japanese planes were Zeroes.

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  • 3 months later...

Thanks all! So this would be from the Betty...

 

Today another piece of a G4M Betty came in: has lots of marks on the outside and nice green and red paint. The way the red is painted doesn't seem to me like it was part of a meatball. Online I did see some red tail numbers and red stripes on the aft section of the fuselage, but those were all very small photos, as are most online photos of Japanese aircraft: more often than not the color photos are of model aircraft.

 

1.jpg

 

2.jpg

 

3.jpg

 

4.jpg

 

5.jpg

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Turns out it is not from a Betty - Japanese naval aircraft had the aluminum interior coated with special paint that was in various shades of blue/green.

 

The backside of this panel is plain aluminum, so it's from a Japanese army aircraft. I did a quick photoshop job to show how this piece would have intersected a red stripe, not a red meatball:

 

stripe.jpg

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Bob,

 

I looked through a bunch of Google images to see if I could find a Betty Bomber with a red stripe.

 

White stripes, yes. But I could not find one in red.

 

Perhaps the original owner took it off a different type of aircraft.

Betty Markings 2.jpg

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Someone on another forum came up with a translation of the writing on the panel:

 

点検孔=Inspection panel

スラット連動桿=Interlocking rod for slats

 

Presumably wing slats: now I'm looking to see which IJA aircraft had slats -

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