New to aircraft - Tamiya P-51 D 1/48

[WarhammerAdjacent]

Hi all, I'm new to this aircraft malarky but I'd like to improve and so for my second serious attempt I've picked a Tamiya P-51. I'm doing this build as part of a charity group build competition type thing to raise money for a children's hospital charity, if you're interested in joining in please take a look at the video here:

 

 

It does mean that I have a deadline so I'm going to work fairly quickly on this one. My plan is to have a stab at Lou IV as I think the paint scheme is interesting and gives scope to try new things without being too ornate. I started the build by painting the cockpit, this one is going to be closed up so I've done some basic chipping, picked out some of the controls and generally tried to make it look interesting without going all in on the detail.

 

 

 

Then the fuselage halves went together and I started cleaning up the seams. This is the bit of aircraft modelling that gets me - more time is spent sanding and re-scribing than painting or building. As I'm doing a metallic finish I need to get it pretty darn smooth so in a couple of places I've erred on the side of removing small details and then trying to rescribe them where I can. I suspect a scribing template might be in my future.

 

 

Currently she is sitting with a coat of alclad black gloss primer whilst I try to clean up the faults the paint revealed, hopefully I can do another coat of primer tonight and it will be time to move on to the aluminium paint.

[bigbadbadge]

Great idea for the GB, I have only partially watched the video as got chores to do so will try again later.  Good luck with your build , great start and that was quick getting it all together.

Chris

[mark.au]

So far so good.  Not sure if you care about these sorts of things, but LOU IV was a D-5 and didn’t have the fillet in front of the tail fin.  It’s not difficult to remove from the Tamiya kit, but a bit easier if done before where you’re at!

 

The real question for a LOU IV build though, is if you’re going to use a green or a blue to paint the upper fuselage and wings where the D-Day stripes were overpainted?

 

Edited April 25, 2021 by mark.au
Clarity

[Biggles87]

Looks like you’re doing well so far.

Good luck.

 

John

[WarhammerAdjacent]

12 hours ago, mark.au said:

So far so good.  Not sure if you care about these sorts of things, but LOU IV was a D-5 and didn’t have the fillet in front of the tail fin.  It’s not difficult to remove from the Tamiya kit, but a bit easier if done before where you’re at!

 

The real question for a LOU IV build though, is if you’re going to use a green or a blue to paint the upper fuselage and wings where the D-Day stripes were overpainted?

 

Damnit, I can’t believe I missed that! I think I’ll probably leave it and accept a little inaccuracy.

 

I think I’ll overspray the invasion stripes with OG, I plan to use RAF green for the rest of the green parts. That seems like the most likely interpretation to me and it looks cool. I think for this build I’m more interested in gaining experience and identifying areas to work on than getting a precisely accurate replica.

 

Thanks for the heads up.

 

Stefan

[WarhammerAdjacent]

I managed to get some work done over the weekend, first priming with Alclad primer which is pretty magical stuff. I then cleaned it up where I'd managed to get some splatter or dust in the surface using a 2000 grit sandpaper and some green polishing compound I had lying around.

 

 

The surface is smooth but not quite glossy which I now know isn't ideal but more on that later. I do have a query on this though - in areas where I applied the alclad gloss black in thin layers it built up to a satin effect but where I was (what I thought was) too heavy handed it left a fantastic glossy finish. What do others do? Apply lots of thin layers or aim for a thinner layer to bond with the plastic and a thicker one for gloss?

 

Next came the aluminium paint. Honestly this is one of those products that I can't help feeling is wasted on someone of my skill level. It is incredible, I was pleased with the finish everywhere but what really got me is how incredible it looks on the areas where the primer was glossiest, it's almost like a mirror! Even where it is merely shiny it looks great and I'm happy with the finish, particularly for a 'well used' Mustang which is where I'm hoping to take this. I managed to get a couple of shots of the aluminium finish but they don't do it justice, if you've mastered getting a clean, smooth, glossy surface to work on you could work real magic with this stuff:

 

 

 

With that done I've been working on making masks for the green paint layers. Thanks to the comments above, particularly Mark, I've decided to go with one of the aircraft of Urban Drew which is the correct model of P-51 D and has a similar paint scheme (actually it's easier to mask).

 

I'm hoping to be able to apply the masks and some RAF green tonight, I can then start working out how to do the invasion stripes and so on.

[WarhammerAdjacent]

A little more work over the last couple of days. Over the weekend I made up some masks which cut on the silhouette machine and applied to allow me to make a cleaner job of the green paint. I then applied RAF green to the wings and upper fuselage.

 

 

 

Unfortunately the masks have lifted the aluminium in places, luckily it is mostly in areas that will be easy to polish and hit with the airbrush without damaging other details. After giving it a couple of days to dry out a little I masked up for the invasion stripes. I applied the white first, in a nearly opaque layer on the underside and mottling the top. I then masked off the black stripes and painted those. I wanted to do the upper surfaces in Olive Drab but to give a hint at the invasion stripes the paint was applied to cover, to achieve this I masked the edges of the black stripes and applied OD to create defined edges and then applied a thinner blend coat over the top.

 

Overall I'm pretty happy with where it is so far, my next job is to tidy up the aluminium and then pick out some of the details.

 

 

EDIT: Spot the hiccough with the insignia! an easy fix but I really should have picked up on it earlier on.

Edited April 28, 2021 by WarhammerAdjacent

[AdrianMF]

29 minutes ago, WarhammerAdjacent said:

hiccough with the insignia!

Just make sure you double-check which one to cover up! I spent 20 minutes last night double-double checking which way up the underwing registration letters are meant to go on my current build, so I know the feeling...

 

Lovely work on this. It is looking super.

 

Regards,

Adrian