Hello, The Tamiya P-51D is without a doubt my most often built kit (their P-47 is a close second). I’m good for at least one a year. I don’t really know why. Perhaps the plethora of schemes? How about inspiration from the men who flew them, like the 357th FG’s Yeager, Anderson, and England to name a few I’ve built already. Maybe its from other inspirational sources? I once built one immediately after seeing the Tuskegee P-51 shoot down a 109 in the movie Hart’s War. It’s certainly not my favorite bird, that would belong to the Spitfire Mk I. So I really don’t know. There’s just something about this subject and this kit that is alluring to me. Out of the box, it’s simple to build and looks like a P-51 when done. That said, the kit has some areas that need improvement, and over the years I’ve developed ways to rectify these. In this thread, my aim is to point these out then show how “I” fixed them. Of course your mileage may vary.
My “recipe” calls for a True Details cockpit, Ultracast seat (in this case), and for this one I will try out the Eduard Brassin wheels.
One of the biggest weaknesses of the kit is the cockpit. Its a far cry from their new 1/32 version. I usually replace it with the True Details example. You can use the Aries pit too but this one is much cheaper and just as nice. Unfortunately the substitution does involve sanding of the kit sidewalls, otherwise, the pit will be too wide and force out the wingroot just enough to flatten the dihedral of the wings. I usually take course sandpaper and sand until you can slightly see through the plastic when held up to the light. Now that I have a Dremel this was a piece of cake. Once done, I superglued the new resin sidewall in place. I filled the top gap where it meets the fuselage with super glue then sanded it flush.
I apparently raided this particular True Details set on an earlier project because the seat was missing. I’m not surprised because these seats are excellent. On a side note, the seats are available separately so you can just use one of these if you don’t want to do all this sanding. It alone will improve things considerably. Anyways, I fortunately had Ultracast seats in the resin stash so I used one here. The TD seat is the whole assembly, while this one you need to add the kit headrest…bummer
Here everything is dryfitted and checked. It appears my sanding is sufficient and the wing angle is where it should be. Oh yeah, I forgot, I here you can where I added a .10 strip of styrene to cover the gap between the resin and plastic at the canopy rail…easy.
It’s time for paint. I utilized Gunze Interior Green as my primary color over flat black to add depth. The center fuel take was painted in XF-24 Dark Grey to simulate the rubber coating for its self sealing properties. To simulate the wooden floor I sprayed it XF-59 Desert Yellow then X-26 Clear Orange. It looks convincing to me. Technically the floor had a black coating on them but I wanted to keep it interesting. The old artistic licensing cliche? Rather than rehash my cockpit process, please see the following for an in-depth tutorial.
http://cs.finescale.com/fsm/modeling_subjects/f/2/t/160714.aspx
A test fit…like a glove.
One night of work and were ready to button it up…and I have no idea what scheme I’m doing. Right now its a toss up between Drew’s Detroit Miss and Preddy’s Cripes A Mighty III…[^o)]
Joe
