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Early P-51D 1/72 - best option?


John

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To the best of my knowledge, there is no injected or resin 1/72 kit of a P-51D-5. It isn't hard to take a P-51D-10 or later kit and remove the dorsal fin fairing (DFF) and fill the area removed, You will need to use an early seat and possibly an early gunsight, depending upon the donor kit. IIRC Pavla and Obscureco  made a resin conversion which had you remove the fuselage forward of the fin and graft on the resin section. I think both are OOP, but you can check auction sites or vendor tables at contests/swap meets. If you are a stickler for accuracy, go with the Airfix kit, as it is the only one in 1/72 scale that got the rear of the wheel bay/mainspar correct; if not, the Tamiya kit is excellent, other than the wheel bay, which has the rear wall angled to match the wheel bay opening, but it isn't all that difficult to correct.  The D-5's might also have had fabric, rather than metal-skinned elevators. Oh yes, if using the Airfix kit, be aware they did not indicate the  balance on the leading edge of the elevators- you just need to scribe it in; when you see it, you will know what to do. Hope this helps!

Mike

 

Pavla U-72-27 P-51D early tail (includes rear fuselage and fin, wheels, elevators, stabilizers, rudder, tailwheel and radiator dump doors)

 

Obscureco OBS72014 early tail (includes rear fuselage and fin, stabilizers)

 

Don't know why Airfix didn't engineer their 1/72 P-51D-10 with either a separate early fuselage or break the rear fuselage at the transport joint to make both versions possible. They did engineer their 1/48 kit to make both  early and late versions .  

Edited by 72modeler
corrected spelling
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Or you could do this - from my recent Airfix P51D build.

 

Filleting the tail, Timstyle.

First to mark out and show where to cut,

Airfix-P51tail-1.jpg

then drill a hole to get a radius at the base, mine was 3mm - I'd try 6mm next time.

Airfix-P51tail-2.jpg

followed by the actual cutting.

Airfix-P51tail-3.jpg

This is what we look like now, preparing to do the seams.

Airfix-P51-filleted.jpg

 

 

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The original Academy offering of the P-51D of nearly 30 years ago was a D-5 with no fillet and included a two piece affair that you would add to the tail if you wanted a later block D model.  However, in an inexcusable, but now an easily corrected mistake, they had only 5 exhaust pipes on each side of the engine.  No resin correction parts in the early 90s.  It has since been replaced with the current, but still a bit long in the tooth version which has the correct number of exhaust pipes per side, but has the tail fillet panel.

Later,

Dave

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12 hours ago, e8n2 said:

The original Academy offering of the P-51D of nearly 30 years ago was a D-5 with no fillet and included a two piece affair that you would add to the tail if you wanted a later block D model.  However, in an inexcusable, but now an easily corrected mistake, they had only 5 exhaust pipes on each side of the engine.  No resin correction parts in the early 90s.  It has since been replaced with the current, but still a bit long in the tooth version which has the correct number of exhaust pipes per side, but has the tail fillet panel.

Later,

Dave

Actually that rings a bell - to the stash!

😀

 

John

 

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7 minutes ago, John said:
7 minutes ago, John said:

they had only 5 exhaust pipes on each side of the engine. 

Actually, I think it was seven stacks on each side- at least that's what my 1st release had! I vaguely recall we had some discussion and photos on RAAF Mustangs, I think they were, that looked like they had a 7-stack arrangement. Turned out to be some clever photoshopping, IIRC! Don't know what Academy was thinking!

Mike

 

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Found it!  Went to Scalemates and found the instructions for the original Academy P-51D.  Here's the link;

 

https://www.scalemates.com/kits/academy-minicraft-1662-p-51d-mustang-north-american-wwii-fighter--135386

 

It clearly shows that it was a D-5 and that parts B11 and 12 were to add the fillet panel.  Counting the exhaust pipes on the parts layout drawing it does appear to have 7 pipes on each side.  Nowadays that should be easy to correct.  At a contest last weekend I thought I saw one for sale for $5, but it was the new plastic.  Drats!  Did pick up a Matchbox Siskin IIIa though!

Later,

Dave

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18 hours ago, 72modeler said:
18 hours ago, John said:
18 hours ago, John said:

they had only 5 exhaust pipes on each side of the engine. 

 

Actually, I think it was seven stacks on each side- at least that's what my 1st release had! I vaguely recall we had some discussion and photos on RAAF Mustangs, I think they were, that looked like they had a 7-stack arrangement. Turned out to be some clever photoshopping, IIRC! Don't know what Academy was thinking!

Mike

It was seven on the Academy P-51D. Even less excusably Arsenal managed to think the same in the otherwise very nice 1/48 Hawker Hart they brought out last year 

84844434-2400744086904705-54702713913097 

Edited by Work In Progress
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I just did a trawl through my stack of old instruction sheets and found the one for that Academy P-51. I guess when I found out about the exhaust pipe mess up, I reduced for re-use and turfed the wings and fuselage. In hindsight, I should have kept it. 

 

Oh well! I've never been accused of being that bright.

 

 

 

Chris

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Strictly speaking, the incidence of the horizontal stabiliser needs to be changed for the filletless tail too. Eduard has accommodated for this with different fuselages in their 1/48th kit. One presumes that when they get around to tooling up the 1/72nd scale kits they will do the same.

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31 minutes ago, Work In Progress said:

Really? That's something I never knew. It surely can't be more than a degree or so

The incidence appears to have been reduced by a couple of degrees after the fillet was introduced. This is from the August 2019 Eduard Info showing how they accommodated the change; you can see the panels are somewhat different as well:

 

49570925731_4e5c684832_b.jpg

 

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4 hours ago, Silverkite said:

also depending on what you are after check the propeller as I remember reading something saying that two different types of propeller were in use and a third type appeared during late stages of after the war

 

Luigi

Original prop was the Hamilton Standard with phenolic cuffs and rounded tips; P-51K's used the Aeroproducts cuffless prop with tapered blades and rounded tips; late production D's, I think beginning with the D-30, used a Hamilton Standard cuffless prop with squared tips. There is also one other version, almost always seen only on restored warbirds, and that is the Hamilton standard cuffed prop with the cuffs removed; it looks at first glance like the Aeroproducts prop, but the blade profile and tip shapes are not the same. Replacing damaged or deteriorating cuffs on a warbird is horribly expensive and with the more efficient radiators available nowadays, the cuffs aren't needed for additional cooling on the ground and low airspeeds like in WW2.

Mike

 

1st link: HS cuffless, square tip  2nd link: Aeroproducts prop  3rd link: HS cuffed prop

 

https://www.plane-encyclopedia.com/ww2/p-51-mustang/

 

http://www.mustangsmustangs.net/p-51/variants/p51k

 

https://pixabay.com/photos/p51-mustang-p-51-aircraft-airplane-3674968/

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I'm arriving late to the party here, but I built a P-51D-5 using the empennage from an Academy P-51B grafted to an Academy P-51D fuselage.  Very simple, very easy and clean modification, it doesn't really rise to the level of a "conversion."  Saves much sanding and rescribing, at the cost of an Academy P-51B.  Which isn't such a sacrifice; that kit's tail is reasonably accurate (unlike the nose, windscreen, wings...)

 

Obscureco offer a resin re-pop of the Academy P-51B tail, costs about as much as a full Academy kit and you can't glue it with styrene cement and you won't get the quite useful cockpit bits.

 

The Academy P-51D kit is crap, no way to sugar coat it.  They did for some reason include radio gear that looks to be a good match for the very early -D models.

 

If I had to do it again (and I plan to, I have decals for Henry Brown's Texas Hun Hunter) I'd start with the Tamiya kit.

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2 minutes ago, Jackson Duvalier said:

I... If I had to do it again (and I plan to, I have decals for Henry Brown's Texas Hun Hunter) I'd start with the Tamiya kit.

Also late to the party, but I'll second that opinion any time.

 

/Finn

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8 minutes ago, Jackson Duvalier said:

The Academy P-51D kit is crap, no way to sugar coat it.

LOL - Yes I built one and was not happy. It ended up in the crusher.

Irrelevant to this conversation but we did find a use for them ...........

https://www.redroomodels.com/product/red-roo-dart-stang-1-72/

You only use the useful bits............

https://www.britmodeller.com/forums/index.php?/topic/234923759-cac-dart-powered-mustang/

 

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8 hours ago, Jackson Duvalier said:

The Academy P-51D kit is crap, no way to sugar coat it.  They did for some reason include radio gear that looks to be a good match for the very early -D models.

IIRC early issues of the Academy P-51D kit were powered by the very rare 14 cylinder Merlin; it had 7 exhaust stacks per side.

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