Finally done. Not a bad kit, as I’ve said before. The biggest fault I find with the kit is missing parts. Not by accident but by design.
Actuators for the main wheel bay doors are missing as is the pitot tube.
The cockpit could use some side wall structure. Thankfully there is room for it to be added, though I did not do this.
I really like how the blast tubes turned out. Worth the work to me.
Something I rarely do is add stores to my models. The opportunity to detail the fuel lines was just to great in this kit. Bigger is definately easier to work with.
Paint is MM enamels and Tamiya acryls. Weather is MIG oils and pigments coupled with an accident.[B)][:-^]
The landing gear are very weak once installed. The soft plastic coupled with an attempt of the designers to make the gear the same as the prototype makes the attaching point very weak.
I have another one of these kits in the stash so the next time I’ll modify the gear to add strength.
I’ve been contemplating what to do with the next kit. Everything from a modern civvie owned unit to waiting on the aftermarket to see what they come up with for the kit and loading it up.
The cowl panels fit pretty well for one wanting to attach them permenantly but to keep them removable as to see the engine is kind of a PITA. They want to fall off with the least of motivation added. The nose art was donated by the recent Hasegawa MKIX Spitfire.
I added very small pins made of wire to the formers then drilled coresponding holes in the thinned cowl panels to help keep the panels in place. The guns are very nicely molded. Maybe next time I will remove one in a maintainance scene.
I never understood why some say that the cockpit in the kit is weak for detail and then call Hasegawas kit better than the Dragon offering.
I’ve now built both kits and the Dragon offering is far superior, IMHO.
When I built the Hase kit I wanted to add all the separate control surfaces that the Dragon comes with. So, I had to cut the kit to pieces to make it happen. The gun bay detail was terrible so I added more there. I reworked the gunsight. I’ve forgotten what all I did to that kit.
But what I know now is that this kit provided much of that work already done for me. An exception was the wheel bay. I corrected the wheel bay structure on this kit, something I did not do to the Hase offering. I was not aware of that problem fifteen years ago.
Adding engine detail was relatively easy with the amount of reference on the net but I drew the line pretty quickly. So much of the equipment under the cowl is very mysterious to me and I just didn’t know where to start.
Finally, I have a large scale Mustang that I can be relatively proud of. In the case it goes, right next to the Hasegawa kit that is in need of a nose repaint. Maybe I’ll do that someday soon and post some pics of it also. The Hasegawa kit was my very first attempt at scratch building anything. Though crude I’m kinda attached to it. The dragon kit really makes it looks it’s age.
