It is my impression that all Mustangs were produced with a laminar wing from the initial production runs. If this is true would it mean that even the camouflaged Mustangs had puttied rivets and seams? Or, was it only the bare metal Mustangs (B,C,D,F,K) with silver lacquered wings have the puttied rivets and seams?
As far as I know, the Mustang family all came from the factory with the puttied wings, whether camouflaged or NMF. (other than the color, what’s the difference between Silver Lacquer and OD Lacquer?)
All P-51 were manufactured with filled wing seams / rivets, irregardless of what paint it was completed in.
And…just to throw a spanner in the works, sometimes, when the airframes were repaired, stripped of paint and left NMF (as they were later in the war) the putty came off with the paint. So…not all P-51’s had puttied wings. From the factory, the fuselage was bare metal, and the wings were puttied and painted silver to allow the laminar flow nature of the wings function as designed.
So - yes, the wings were puttied…and no, they weren’t.
Painful, isn’t it?
All wings are laminar- that’s what causes lift and makes airplanes fly.
Hmm. Not so quick there CC. I found this info:
Laminar flow airfoils were originally developed for the purpose of making an airplane fly faster. The laminar flow wing is usually thinner than the conventional airfoil, the leading edge is more pointed and its upper and lower surfaces are nearly symmetrical. The major and most important difference between the two types of airfoil is this, the thickest part of a laminar wing occurs at 50% chord while in the conventional design the thickest part is at 25% chord.
The effect achieved by this type of design of a wing is to maintain the laminar flow of air throughout a greater percentage of the chord of the wing and to control the transition point. Drag is therefore considerably reduced since the laminar airfoil takes less energy to slide through the air. The pressure distribution on the laminar flow wing is much more even since the camber of the wing from the leading edge to the point of maximum camber is more gradual than on the conventional airfoil. However, at the point of stall, the transition point moves more rapidly forward.
Thanks everyone for the responses, plus! Special thanks to Blueline for providing the wing profiles. I am working on a D and two B’s, which I knew came puttied, but I was not sure about the Allison Mustangs. I have four of them in my stash! I have herd that some pilots would strip off the lacquer and putty with the purpose of lightening their planes.
I guess that means that, without evidence one way or another, a Mustang can be modeled one way or another and still be correct.
So-called laminar flow airfoils are intended to extend the region of laminar flow back further along the chord length. At most angles of attack, especially cruise, the flow starts out laminar at the leading edge, but transitions from laminar to turbulent at some chord point. The region of turbulent flow (not complete seperation, but merely turbulent in the thin boundary layer) has more drag than the flow in the laminar region. Therefore the further back the laminar flow goes, the lower the drag. Laminar flow airfoils tend to have max thickness further aft than older, more conventional airfoils.
However, even the slightest roughness on the surface (bug residue, etc.) trips flow into turbulent, so laminar flow airfoils don’t have as much advantage as designers hoped, unless kept scrupulously clean.
Just curious on a related question were the post World War II F-51s used in the Air National Guard and the Korean War puttied as well?