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P-51D Daddy's Girl (Or how to ruin a perfectly good Tamiya Mustang kit)


Squibby

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Did you know that for some inexplicable reason, Tamiya moulded the tail wheel doors back to front?

The moulded detail is fairly accurate but it's facing the wrong direction. The indents need to be facing the rear end of the plane as this is where the actuating arms (I'm planning to add) attach.

So out came the knife and after some careful cutting I removed the doors and swapped them around. I cleaned up the cut line a bit and hid it underneath a 'hinge' detail made up of a bit of wire fixed under some aluminum tape and scored at regular intervals.

 

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I also took to the carb intake grilles with a pinvice and spent half an hour drilling out the holes.

 

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  • 1 year later...

Arise zombie thread! I'm not quite done with you yet...

 

I've been a bit busy for the last year or so with the arrival of our daughter and all the dramas that babies come with.

Now that she's a bit older and before she gets old enough to terrorize my modelling bench I'm going to try to finish off this build, given the great effort I've gone to so far it would be a shame not to.

 

I'm a bit nervous about rushing into it after being away from the hobby for a bit so I've eased myself into things by trial running some ideas around the natural metal finish.

I've never really attempted a proper NMF before and I wanted to experiment with recreating a moderately worn, oxidized finish that had some variation and if possible recreate that 'oil canning' / stretched skin effect commonly seen in photos.

 

I grabbed some spare bits from a 1/72 wildcat and after messing around for a couple of days I ended up with this. The photos don't do it justice but it looks quite good in reality, also definitely not as dark in tone as they look here...

 

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I undertook various trials using the range of Vallejo metal colours I had available. I ended up using a similar method to the 3 layer blend I use for regular finishes.

  1. First up was a grey primer, I used some Badger Stylnrez (primarily to test the stuff out). 
  2. After rubbing the primer down with some paper towel I hit it with a gloss coat (Alclad Aquagloss in this case). If you had a suitably glossy grey primer / paint you could use this instead.
  3. I laid down a coat of Dull Aluminium. Dull is easier to overpaint and tones down the sheen we get later... Coincidentally this stuff is a pig to get out of the airbrush.
  4. I went over the part with highly thinned flat black (Tamiya XF-1, 1:5 with X20A) and scribbled in squiggly lines and mottled the surfaces. I also darkened a few panels. 
  5. I hit the part with another coat of gloss. This is important as the XF-1 flattens the surface out.
  6. I went over with blend coat of Chrome heavily thinned with X20A (1:10 ratio) this allowed me more control with how much I laid down. I also trialed using plain Aluminium but Chrome being a higher shine shade was more translucent. 
  7. The end result turned out predictably shiny, to deal with this I sprayed it over with some flat (W&N Matt UV Varnish, 1:2 with X20A). I shaded over some panels more heavily to get a more oxidized look and break up the surface some more.

I figure if I slip in a coat of gloss before step 7 and get the decals on I should be golden.

Also while adding the blend coat (step 6) I could use other metal tones (highly thinned of course) to accentuate specific panels or the flight surfaces etc.

 

Anyway, baby steps for now. I'll dust off the bits and start getting into the build itself soon. Hopefully with no more year long breaks...

Edited by Squibby
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One of the issues with this kit is the canopy. It comes in 2 pieces, one clear bit that attaches to a frame piece. 

The clear bit doesn't perfectly line up with the frame and can show as a step. It wasn't too noticeable unless you looked from underneath so I decided I could live with it.

 

The second issue is that the clear bit has an attachment pin at the end which clearly shows through once fitted. After wracking my brains a bit I fashioned a covering piece from aluminium foil tape.

This makes the frame sweep higher around the end of the canopy which is inaccurate but necessary to avoid an unsightly peg mark showing through the glass.

 

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I'll stick with it for now, but to be honest it's not ideal. I think I might just get a Vac form version and be done with this headache.

Then again I've doggedly smashed my way through solving this kits shortfalls so far without looking for aftermarket parts so why start now...

Edited by Squibby
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In an effort to finish off any little bits of detailing before I closed the fuselage I spent a little time on the tail wheel bay.

This area is fairly well hidden but it looked a bit empty given the kit has zero detail or structure modeled here.

 

I didn't go to the effort of fully boxing it up but I added some slotted side panels to add a bit of interest if you bothered to look up there.

It took me a few attempts with a punch tool to get the slots cut, and they still look really rough. I'm not going to sweat it though as this area is barely visible.

 

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I'm open to tips on cutting nice clean slots like this in a row. Whatever I do the holes always end up skewed all over the place :(

 

 

 

 

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16 hours ago, Biggles87 said:

The only thing I've tried for slots was to punch round holes then use a round needle file to elongate them, but that was in 1/32.

 

John

Same here, with the variant of using the Dremel sanding tool shaped like a pointy cone, which is normally pointier than a needle file. However, I did that on hard plastic, not sure on how it would react on stock card.

 

Nice detailing job, BTW :clap:

 

Ciao

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Made some real progress finally and buttoned up the fuselage. 

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Fit was quite good generally, though the gaps around the radiator discharge duct are truly a sight to behold 😣. The engineering here is trash and results in these huge gaping gaps. Lucklily I don't need to fix them completely as most of it will be hidden by the door.

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Edited by Squibby
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I'll try a liberal squirt of PPP, but I think I'll need some styrene wedged in there first.

 

Those little locating pins make this area a bit of annoying to sand, the topmost ones are useful for locating the radiator flap door.

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Great to see a restart of this build.

 

Slots in sheet styrene....yes. I can offer the previously mentioned method of drilling and cutting but a step up occurred for me when I got a CriCut digital cutter for Christmas. `This tool allows me to design a shape using any of several graphics software types and send it to the cutter which then cuts the shapes. I experimented with this by making a complex FW190 A-5 inner gear door in 1/48 using Photoshop:

 

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Edited by Crimea River
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Interesting, seems like a cool tool.

 

In any case I've started cleaning up the fuselage. I put off the radiator duct gaps for now and worked on finishing up around the cockpit so I can button it up under the glass ready for painting.]

I cleaned up the coaming and fitted the gunsight. I then messed up fitting the rear panel cover thing I scratched up to cover a mistake I made on page 3 😁 Luckily it was salvageable with a bit of sanding and repainting..

 

This is where I'm at now. 

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Edited by Squibby
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Finally cracked that stupid radiator duct gap. It took what seemed like an endless process of filling, sanding, priming but I finally think I sorted it...and all the collateral damage...😐

 

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Ignore the rough bit at the top of the duct it'll be completely hidden by the door.

Annoyingly though my sanding has taken a bit too much material off one of the side walls and the door fits with a larger gap on that side. Not too noticeable when the door is in the open position luckily, but it still bugs me 😑

 

Edited by Squibby
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Wow, just saw this. Looks like quite the journey you’ve been on! I can relate, I’ve got a 16 month old daughter running around. Between her and my job which requires a large amount of travel, I don’t have much time to devote to building. 

 

Just wanted to add a couple comments.

1) This is quite an old kit (released in 1995), and as you’ve noticed it has some obvious shortcomings. The tenacity with which you’ve attacked this build is commendable!

2) The raised rivets near the gear bays and on top of the wing represent stiffening that had been done to reinforce the area post-war on the particular plane Tamiya’s team used as its base. Of note, this same feature was also present on the Accurate Miniatures Allison-engined Mustangs, which were released in 1994.

3) Would it be possible to put a thin shim on the radiator door to eliminate the gap? Or would that make things a little wonky?

 

Thanks for sharing this beauty of a build, I will need to incorporate some of your tricks when I build future Mustangs!

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Thanks mate, 

 

It took some doing, I initially filled with PPP (perfect plastic putty) but it didn't really fill that well. I mostly used it as a substrate for my usual filler of CA glue accelerated with baking soda. 

 

Requires a lot of careful sanding though which I was mostly successful at 😁

 

To be honest I can't see any reason to build this kit again given the far better offerings from Airfix, Eduard and Meng. 

 

The end is in sight though and we're getting to the fun stuff (painting) soon. 

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So after several days of sanding and filling and cleaning up the fuselage I've finally gotten it to a point that I like.

 

I've come to the realization in this time that I'm comically rubbish at scribing. The main panels joins are easy enough but smaller panels and access hatches took at least 2-3 attempts and still look a bit pedestrian if you look closely 😁

 

The underside area is quite busy with panel lines and what the kit represents doesn't really match up with any of the 3-views I've been using. I ended up removing some panels and access hatches completely. I also filled in the little recessed bit where the oil cooler discharges with some thin plastic card due to how difficult it would have been to clean up

 

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The front was generally easier but I had some issues with the little intake slot at the front. I ended up scribing in a slot after a few attempts that looked clean enough, however even still it's a little oversized compared to the real deal.

 

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The fasteners I ended up sanding off or softening too much were added back in using a sharpened bit of brass tube in a pin vice.

I started off cleaning up seams using CA + baking soda as filler but decided to try the often mentioned melted sprue in Tamiya extra thin. I just so happened to have an old bottle of the stuff and lots of sprue lying around.

It took a couple of hours to melt all the sprue in the bottle and I ended up with a slightly viscous cloudy grey and very smelly solution which surprisingly worked really well for filling in those annoying micro seams. It took a bit longer to dry but when it did it sanded really easily compared to the CA and left a much better finish.

I think this concoction will be my primary seam cleanup filler from now on. 

It has a few downsides I saw though, it takes an hour or so to cure (longer if applied heavily), don't try sanding it before hand you'll end up with a huge mess. Also it doesn't have any real structure so can't be used to build up edges (like the oil cooler flap edge in my case). Thirdly if used to fill in a deep gap (like the failed attempts at scribing that front intake slot) it remains a bit soft and doesn't always penetrate down causing the scriber to gouge out chunks 😣.

 

 

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