tourist

Great start. That kit is really tempting, I'd better start saving.

There we go again. I thought I was out but you pulled me back in! Great start, it looks the part.

I think I have a measurement for the width, I'll try to find it later. I can already say that Paragon and Phoenix are closer to the real thing, Verlinden's is too large and Dragon's way too small.

Good color Mustang pictures from WWII aren't very common, most of them are well know (being printed in many books). Sites like Little Friends or Web-Birds have some nice ones. http://littlefriends.co.uk/ http://www.web-birds.com/ This one came from an old magazine (towards the end of the war I think) and these are hard to come by. It was posted on the SIG forums by one of the members.

Great work!. I agree with Ironwing about the upper cowl, I guess it may be a little thick (giving the impression it seats too high), nothing a little additional sanding wouldn't correct. It could also just be the photo. The wing's airfoil drawing looks good to me. Her's a great picture recently posted posted by one of the guys on the P-51 SIG:

Looking good Geoff! I think you're right, the radio maybe undersized but the safest move is probably to get something that fits and looks the part rather than something which is accurately sized but may look to big (which I also suspect may happen here).

A lot of restored Mustang claim to be "factory" accurate but I've never seen one which truly is. There are a lot of reasons for this, one as to do with the fact that all the parts in a restored P-51 are primed to prevent corrosion and static electricity. This was not always the case during production in WWII where because of time constraint only some "sensitive" parts where protected. Another reason has to do with availability of parts, for example Happy Jack's represents a P-51D-5NA but is built as a mix between a P-51D-20NA and a P-51D-25NA as are most of the restored P-51Ds. It is much

That looks great, I wish you had a larger picture.

I would guess it's the trumpeter kit?

Of course that's always an option. Still there's no need to be so drastic. If you just follow these 6 simple steps you can get a very nice looking Mustang out of the Airfix kit: 1- Sand the surface to get rid of the raised rivets and get it all smooth. 2- Fill in the appropriate panel lines on the wings (very easy on this kit). 3- Correct the wing dihedral. 4- Correct the wheel struts in order to show the oleos compressed and add brake lines. 5- Close the main wheel doors. 6- Add seat belts. In my opinion these are the minimum steps to get a good Mustang out of this kit, wi

In my opinion there's not much you can use from the Trumpy kit. The wheels are a bit better but not fully accurate either. The wings are definitely better on the Airfix kit (Trumpy's are too small) but they have no dihedral at all and you'll need to create a spar to remedy that. The wheel wells need to be built from scratch. The cockpit needs a lot of work (but is much better than Trumpy's). If you want a different canopy you'll have to make one. The panel lines are a bit heavy and need to be toned down (as well as some rescribing in places for accuracy and general surface work). That's

Looks like Laurent is right. I hadn't checked the part before (will do tonight) relying instead on poor photographs (such as the one I posted last page) which can be tricky. I will need to investigate a little further, I recall pictures of an aircraft during restoration showing this part to be a metal plate with an opening onto the wing surface. I guess the canvas covers could have been placed on top of that, or the restoration in question was a little more "imaginative" than I previously thought. For modeling purposes however the canvas cover seems like the way to go.

I'm looking forward to your pictures. The old Airfix kit is better but far from perfect. The weirdest thing is that I like the way the Trumpeter big Mustang looks, it's full of inaccuracies yet it's "Beefy Mustang" look is kinda attractive.

Weird! I can see the pictures fine. Sounds like a computer problem, maybe an LSPer with some computer experience (in other words not me) can help out?

De rien cher ami.