315 Sqn P-51 Mustang III

Natural Metal on those 50's Jets Seem to fill my shelves, so when I looked at building some P-51 Mustangs I thought should be no hassle. NMF is what I do best. I have decals for all things NMF including the pony's so naturally my initial plan was to follow the same path. That was until I came across the RAF Mustang's in camo. Something really fascinated me about the schemes and to my eye look bloody fantastic on the Mustang. I scrapped my plans to do all metal after I had built and assembled and Painted with Alclad two of the P-51's I have on my bench. Im glad I did not start placing the decal's on when I changed my mind.

The Tamiya P-51B in 1/48th scale needs no introduction, much has been written about it web-wide. Simply
marvelous to build with very little problems. As both of the following models are out of the box builds I did not add or modify in any way. though a nice set of Eduard prepainted harness would have been nice.

The build was pretty straight forward after closing the fuselage halves with no incident and little filler. The fit of wing assembly to the fuse is spot on and really tight requiring very little gluing.

Painting as instructed using Model Master,I used Techmod Decals for the Invasion striped P-51 and kit decals for the other. I wanted a weary look for so I chipped the paint off to expose the metal underneath.Pretty straight forward and I like the result.I weathered the models using my usual system of an acrylic wash of black-brown for the panel lines and tamiya smoke sprayed on. various panels were picked out and sprayed a lighter base color to produce a worn effect. all topped with a flat clear to finish.

Final assembly of all the landing gear etc finished off both projects.