dennismcc Posted January 19, 2021 Share Posted January 19, 2021 That looks really lifelike. Cheers Dennis Alex 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Alex Posted January 19, 2021 Author Share Posted January 19, 2021 12 hours ago, Gazzas said: Jeepers that looks nice! 8 hours ago, dennismcc said: That looks really lifelike. Cheers Dennis Thanks! I hope to have a significant update later today or tomorrow with the cockpit sides completed... Slow progress but (fingers crossed) stuff seems to be working. dennismcc and Kagemusha 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Alex Posted January 20, 2021 Author Share Posted January 20, 2021 Front office starting to come together. Just dry fit for now. Added the kit cockpit placard decals and a few extras from an Airscale set to match reference photos. As usual for Tamiya this is all a super-tight-tolerance click fit, so you have to be super careful that nothing you add from scratch in any way interferes, because there's no wiggle room at all. So far it seems to fit both sides, but I still need to check that the whole fuselage closes around it. That test also requires the radiator ducting assembly, which I finished and which also fits with zero room to spare. At some point tonight or tomorrow I will work up the courage to check if the fuselage closes around that and the cockpit... ;-) I also started to add in more plumbing and linkages between firewall and engine. Some of these need to be painted black still. Some of those will need to be teased into position to follow the engine bearers once the engine is in the closed fuselage. I need to get that all dry fit next and see how much of the additional hardware that runs along the outside of the engine bay I want to try to build. I know already that I'm not going to try and replicate Mark's amazing job on the propellor speed control linkage, one because I do not have the chops to do it, and two because there is no clearance between the port engine bearer and the water pump housing for it to fit. Even Tamiya's scale engineering isn't *perfect*. I also need to dry fit the battery box and its mount, which in this model Mustang sits in the engine bay between intercooler and oil tank. That's going to impact routing for plumbing, and also prevent great visibility to stuff underneath it (hence I may not put anything more there). We'll see. I want to leave no stone that I'm capable of building unturned here, but I can feel the point of diminishing returns approaching... Gazzas, LSP_Kevin, MikeMaben and 7 others 10 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
themongoose Posted January 21, 2021 Share Posted January 21, 2021 On 1/16/2021 at 8:57 PM, Alex said: After a frustrating week of being too busy with work to do much, I was able to put in some time today (and it's a long weekend in the States, in honor of Dr. King, so more time to work tomorrow and Monday). IP and gunsight. Most of the center part of the cockpit. It still needs to be flat-coated and hit with some additional weathering. But I want to wait to have the cockpit sides, which get built directly on the fuselage sides, completed first so I can be sure to get the level of weathering consistent. I used RB Productions seat belts - quite a nice accessory, and easy to build. The instructions had a useful suggestion to use a "glue stick" poster adhesive stick to glue them together rather than CA or PVA. Worked great. What did you use to do the glass on the Ip? That is some of the best I’ve seen Alex 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Alex Posted January 21, 2021 Author Share Posted January 21, 2021 54 minutes ago, themongoose said: What did you use to do the glass on the Ip? That is some of the best I’ve seen It’s just what the kit provides. The Tamiya clear parts are very good - very clear and smooth. I applied the kit instrument decal on the back of the clear part, and then painted the back of that black to prevent light from shining through the instrument faces. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
waroff Posted January 21, 2021 Share Posted January 21, 2021 Great work on an interesting subject. The headrest cushion was pine green color(NAA) and the firewall in stainless was bare metal. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dodgem37 Posted January 21, 2021 Share Posted January 21, 2021 (edited) Great show. ''I also need to dry fit the battery box and its mount, which in this model Mustang sits in the engine bay between intercooler and oil tank.' The Trumpeter 1/24 P-51D has this configuration, also. Do you/does anyone know when this started during production? Thank you. Sincerely, Mark Edited January 21, 2021 by dodgem37 mpk 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Alex Posted January 21, 2021 Author Share Posted January 21, 2021 2 hours ago, dodgem37 said: Great show. ''I also need to dry fit the battery box and its mount, which in this model Mustang sits in the engine bay between intercooler and oil tank.' The Trumpeter 1/24 P-51D has this configuration, also. Do you/does anyone know when this started during production? Thank you. Sincerely, Mark Hmm. No, I don’t and had wondered a bit about it. The kit instructions/parts give two possible placements, one behind the radio and one in the engine bay. Variant B in the instructions, which seems closest in time frame and deployed location to the subject I’m trying to do, has it in the engine bay. The USAAF parts manual reproduction that I just received (which is very useful in general) shows it in the engine bay as well. It is dated March 1945, so around or slightly before Mustangs were deployed to Iwo Jima to support the B-29 raids originating from fields in the Marianas. I also wasn’t aware that there was a 1/24 kit. I hope that it is fatally flawed in some way so that I’m not tempted to buy it... ;-) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Alex Posted January 21, 2021 Author Share Posted January 21, 2021 2 hours ago, dodgem37 said: Great show. ''I also need to dry fit the battery box and its mount, which in this model Mustang sits in the engine bay between intercooler and oil tank.' The Trumpeter 1/24 P-51D has this configuration, also. Do you/does anyone know when this started during production? A little bit of additional digging (https://www.mustangsmustangs.net/p-51/variants/p51d) reveals that the inclusion of the K-14 gyro computing gunsight, which is also included only in the kit variant that has the relocated battery, began with the Block 20 P-51Ds, which started production in October 1944. So perhaps (but I haven’t found an explicit statement of this) the battery relocation happened with that block as well. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Alex Posted January 21, 2021 Author Share Posted January 21, 2021 Adding a little bit more - the Tamiya kit (which is specifically meant to be about PTO Mustangs) provides 3 schemes/variants. “A” and “C” are a P-51K and an F-6D recon plane respectively. They both have the battery behind the radio. “B” is a P-51D, 45 FS / 15 FG stationed on Iwo Jima at the end of the war. My Osprey book has an illustration of the same aircraft (46-3483) and says it is a block 20. All of the aircraft illustrated in the book (from 15, 21, 506 FGs) are either block 20 or 25 P-51Ds. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Alex Posted January 21, 2021 Author Share Posted January 21, 2021 Here are a couple of photos from IMPS Stockholm of a restored (with creative paint scheme) P-51D (no block info) with the engine bay battery fitment. dodgem37 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Alex Posted January 21, 2021 Author Share Posted January 21, 2021 In other news, the fuselage of my P-51D closes nicely around both cockpit and radiator ducting. Conveniently, it's possible to get the cockpit in, tape the top of the fuselage, and then slip the radiator assembly in from the front. That's good, because the way the ducting assembly fits makes it very tricky to actually close the fuselage halves around it. I didn't want to have to juggle both pieces and both halves of the fuselage at once if I could avoid it. Now I have to get to grips with finishing the engine bay detailing and confirming that it all closes around the engine correctly. dodgem37, Greg W, Gazzas and 11 others 14 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Alex Posted January 21, 2021 Author Share Posted January 21, 2021 Here's another great document for people who are obsessed with P-51 anatomy. Free on line, 300-pages on how to take one out of the shipping crate and assemble it. https://stephentaylorhistorian.files.wordpress.com/2020/04/p-51d-part-1.pdf MikeMaben, Greg W, dodgem37 and 1 other 2 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dodgem37 Posted January 22, 2021 Share Posted January 22, 2021 Good show. Thank you for your research. About the Trumpeter 1/24 Mustang. It's both good and accurate, and bad and not accurate, well detailed and poorly detailed, has it's detractors, and it's advocates. but can be built up nicely. It just comes down to whether you can live with, or correct, what's wrong with it. https://www.largescaleplanes.com/articles/article.php?aid=525 I see from looking thu this article the battery is not in the engine bay, but some other device is. My memory . . . Another: https://www.largescaleplanes.com/articles/article.php?aid=816 Sincerely, Mark Alex, Gazzas and Landrotten Highlander 3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Alex Posted January 22, 2021 Author Share Posted January 22, 2021 Even more on the battery/radio question. I recently got another P-51 reference... One of the things that this book emphasizes (although parts of this info is in other pubs as well, obviously, is that the Block 20 and 25 Mustangs deployed in the Western Pacific were the most comprehensively equipped with electronics gear of any P-51s flown in WW2. Maybe the spiritual forebears of today's F-35? The Mustangs on Iwo Jima were equipped with a twin-antenna AN/ARA-8 homing transponder (note the two antennas on the dorsal spine, unique to the Iwo Jima planes) that allowed them to home to the B-29 flights originating from the Marianas that they were tasked with escorting. The usual mustang SCR-522 radio mast was relocated to underneath the fuselage, as seen above. In addition, these Mustangs were equipped with an SCR-695 IFF transponder to allow them to be recognized by friendly radar as they returned to Iwo Jima (and presumably by US Navy shipborne radars too, although I didn't see this explicitly stated). Cramming all this radio gear (which was big - this is still the age of vacuum tubes) into the fuselage meant that something had to give, and that was the battery. It was moved to the engine bay so that the SCR-695 transmitter could be placed on the rear deck where the battery sat in other Mustangs. Here's a diagram showing the Iwo Jima setup. Which I found here: https://iwojimamodels.com/2019/08/29/getting-it-right/ That page contains a nice description of the specific mods made to the Mustangs that flew from Iwo Jima. One additional photo from the Squadron book really evokes the brutal conditions endured by the Iwo Jima P-51 FGs. The whole island was covered in crushed coral gravel (especially after the massive shelling it received prior to the Marine landing to capture the island). So everything filled up with gritty coral dust that could never be fully cleaned away. The USAAF personnel, from senior officers down to privates, lived in tents pitched on the windswept, dusty plain - there were effectively no permanent structures built. In the early weeks, they were occasionally forced to deal with random Japanese holdouts assaulting these tent barracks at night. Greg W 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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