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).

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

I would guess it's the trumpeter kit?

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.

NOOOOOOOO......Not my eyes! I need them to work! I suspected adapting the Revell wings could be tricky but I'm sure you'll come up with the best solution (sorry I've never done it and you're a much better modeler anyway). On the plus side you can rely on the overall shape & dimensions of the Revell wings, they're sound. The P-51B nose was slightly different from the D, for more details you should read the current thread in the P-51 SIG (Crazy stuff). For the most part though these differences were just about different placement of drain holes and such. You wrote that my sketch isn't visible, do you mean you can't see it? (because I can) or just that it doesn't show what you need? Here are some more detail drawings that should give a better idea of the floor arrangement.

Geoff, I'm always surprised by how sharp your work is. I always thought a 1/32 Mustang cockpit was a small place to work in but you make it look easy. I just have one little critique about the rear part of the floor (I know, I'm a bad man...) . It's not very important because most of it will be barely visible in the end. The metallic plate below the seat shouldn't come all the way to the control stick. It was further back and had an "opening" to the "real" floor (which was the top of the wing) where the armor plate mounts where attached. Basically imagine two floors; the bottom one is the top of the wing (slightly curved) and above it the flat wooden floor. The control stick, fuel gauges and armor plate mounts where all fixed on the wing. Here's a quick sketch which I hope will help make some sense of this. The shape of the Metallic plate isn't exactly accurate on my drawing but that's the idea. Here are more references. On the photo you can see a part of the metallic plate (below the "transparent" seat).

I haven't seen the Zeke and George kits in person and I don't know a lot about Japanese aircrafts so I can't really comment. Cybermodeler has reviews and sprue shots of both kits: http://www.cybermodeler.com/hobby/kits/ban...ban_38507.shtml http://www.cybermodeler.com/hobby/kits/ban..._ban_8522.shtml