Hi All,
Having just completed a Tamiya 1/32 Corsair, I impulse-bought a P51 yesterday. I'll put up the remaining photos of my Corsair soon (in another thread). In the mean time I'm doing some preliminary work on the P-51.
I got back into modelling a few years ago, and one of the first I tried was the Hasagawa P-51. It's not a bad model, but I was still pretty clueless back then. I've had quite a number of adventures with foiling since then, and I feel really confident with it now. I'm now pretty ok with foiling, I do panel at a time, and have nice burnishing of each panel, and so on. So I'm going to do this P-51 in foil.
So I have some questions along those lines. First - the wings. I know now that at least most of the time, rivets were sanded and parts of the wing surface were painted grey/silver. So a foiled finish here is perhaps not very historical. On the other hand, from past experience, foiling does a nice job of lowering surface detail a touch if you paint over it. If I foil the whole wing and then paint parts of it silver/gray, it will more-or-less replicate the effect of the sanding/painting on historical planes. Alternatively, I can go for a bare metal finish overall, but there seems to be controversy about that on the wings. Foil bare metal certainly will show up surface detail in any case. So. . . thoughts?
In the mean time, check out this incredible 1/5 scratch build by David Glen. This is . . . perhaps . . . the best P-51 model I've ever seen. . . hmm... I'm actually using his model as source material, it seems to have more accuracy than I'll ever need to reproduce.
http://www.spitfireinmyworkshop.net/p51d-gallery.php?selimage=6&c=3