Very nice Jets. The 262 has lovely lines - certainly the most innovative plane of WWII. Strange but true - Hitler had defenders in his desire to make the jet a bomber. The Luftwaffe had vanished over the Western Front and Wehrmacht morale was not helped at all. Actually there were thousands of German sorties of all types flown against the allies in the West - but tens of thousands flown against the Germans.
Meng P-51D 1/48
p-51wings by Eric Bergerud, on Flickr
primed by Eric Bergerud, on Flickr
This year has been beyond weird and between plague, revolution and two new classes to teach, I have been distracted.
I can report in on some progress. As noted earlier this is an odd kit. Meng, for reasons that must remain known only to the styrene gods, decided to build a P-51 Bandai kit. Supposedly you don't need glue - but at well over 100 parts this kit is hardly beginner. This is my first Meng kit and I'm not impressed. I have their 1/35 Renault FT-17 tank which looks very nice (tiny of course). I have heard that they picked a very odd way to do a King Tiger. And I know that they botched the top wing of their 1/32 Fokker DrI Triplane. (Unconfirmed word was that Meng was doing the plastic for Wingnut Wings. We do know WNW had a DRI ready for release when they folded their tent. One thing that made WNW special were their splendid instructions - almost research booklets. The instructions here are very spare and the top wing has a definite "bow" which they picked up immediately at the definitive WorldWarIAirplane site. Andy the very nice YouTube Hobby Headquarters channel built it - he didn't mention it, but the bow was there and it looks bad. Been told you can soak it in very hot water and straighten it. Hope so.)
And now I've got this one. Because of the very odd construction techniques you have to get used to assembling the kit like you'd do a complex Lego build. Things don't really fit as much as they "snap" into place. It looks like "no way this is going to work" but you move things a bit, and in the part goes. But not always perfectly. I've had to sand several attachment points. The instructions are very poor and give one no idea about build sequence. The problem is that in several major steps there is a required sequence - but you're going to have to figure it out yourself. (Tamiya always gives you a heads up.) Worse, there was a lot of flash and the sprue gates were far too large. So there was prep on basically every part. But, once the prep was done and the fiddling finished, things do go together. Some of the joins - like the wing roots are perfect. Others are decent but a little off. Because the pieces all go down seam lines, it was easy to fix some of the imprecise fits with a very thin run of acrylic putty - worked great for this light duty.
As also noted earlier Meng has given the modeler the job of eliminating panel lines on almost all of the wings to replicate the "laminar flow" technology used by North American. That did take some time. But almost all of the faults are now invisible thanks to my "go to" primer Duplicolor Hot Rod Black. Duplicolor makes a million paints and primers for auto work. This primer is a lacquer which means it melds into the surface perfectly. (This is a real live lacquer and I use a rattle can outside. It comes down very thin but dries fast. Paul Budzig recommends this stuff and he knows everything.) It is "sandable" and "fillable" which means that scratches will no longer exist and you can sand it with light grit and get the surface as gloss as you want. In my case, I don't want a super gloss black because service aircraft were never mirror shinny. In addition, North American didn't sand their wings for laminar flow - the plane was made of metal, not plastic, so the wings were puttied over and then spray painted silver. The fuselage was Natural Metal. Pretty soon I'll get out the Vallejo Metal Color Acrylics and paint it aluminum and silver. I've had good look with them in the past. In my house lacquer or lacquer/acrylic paints are out. But this will work. I think I'll give it a Blue Nose and use some Eagle Strike Decals for the famous 352 FG of 8th AF.
First though I'm going to try out a couple of new techniques for canopy masking. I've never made a perfect canopy and there's a lot of glass on a P51D. I'm going to experiment with very thin strips of masking tape and some Bob Divley Liquid Masking Film which comes highly recommended. If I can get that done right, I don't think finishing the plane will be an ordeal. I've got until late December.
Eric