Tamiya P-51D build, my second "Short-Fuse Sallie"

O, 

Very nice indeed.  Nice soft edges on the overall, paint as well! 

You're both better people than I am. I looked at the tanks for my P-51D and said, "Nah, I am building this as it sits after a combat mission in which he dropped the tanks."

It's the lazy way, haha.

-BD-

Hi Don,

It looks like I might be a little late with this, but I thought I'd share how I did the paper tanks for one of my Mustangs.  First, I sanded to eliminate the seam.  I'm sure you're aware that doing so also eliminates the scalloped look of the paper at the front and rear of the tanks.  I was able to replace the scalloped look by using scraping the parts with a #10 General Purpose Xacto blade.  I scraped from the forward-most strapping towards the nose, and from the rear-most strapping towards the tail.  A couple of scrapes was all it took to restore the subtle indentations.  After the scraping was done, I took some fine sandpaper and rounded the "peaks" that resulted between scraped areas.  The great thing about this process is that  you can vary the depth of adjacent indentations to give the tanks a little more "personalilty."

If you're interested, here is the post showing my Mustang with its paper tanks, and a larger picture that better illustrates the final results.

Good luck with your build!

Cheers,

-O

(Edit for broken link to Mustang build post: http://cs.finescale.com/fsm/modeling_subjects/f/2/t/153434.aspx )

I am waiting for my new cockpit, as the Tamiya is rather lacking.  But in the mean time, here are parts of the build. 

I have found that cementing the stabilizers in from behind while the ship is about works better.  I then use Bondex to fill and smooth any gaps.