Profile Photo
Paul van Acker
118 articles

Airfix P51D Mustang 357th 8th Airforce 1/48

March 3, 2020 · in Aviation · · 12 · 1.6K

P51D-5 flown by Lt John Howell 364th FS, 357thFG 8th Airforce RAF Leiston, July 1944. Pleasure to build. I had to paint over the red checkered decals s my insignia red didn't quite match. But a steady hand seemed to work. I painted all of the yellow.

The invasion stripes were masked cause I have tried doing them free hand as it would have been. For me, it doesn't work out well in 1/48. I tried messing ut up a little.
Hope you like. Thanks for lookjng.

357th #airfix #p51mustang #48scale #bullseyedecals

Reader reactions:
14  Awesome

10 additional images. Click to enlarge.


12 responses

  1. What's not to like about a P-51? Nice work here Paul.

    "Liked"
    @paulwoodyvanacker

  2. Nice job, Paul. Great paintwork.

  3. Nice work. It is indeed a nice model.

    A note on D-Day stripes: by this period (late June/July) when the stripes were removed from the upper surfaces, the original hastily-applied stripes had been touched up and improved by the ground crews. So what you have here is more correct than you thought.

    • Interesting note. Invasion stripes and their tidiness (or lack of it) is a recurring theme in modeling discussions, and I often pondered if masking with a ragged edged tape would reproduce the look of hastily applied stripes more scale-accurately. But then again...wouldn’t “scale effect” nulify such defects? In the end, I’d guess plain masking and taping would be the way to go. That or brush painting - good brush, steady hand, blue moon thinning...

    • Good to know. Thanks so much as always. ?

  4. A good looking Mustang! Well done.

  5. Beautiful build! Great job on the checkers!

  6. Nicely done! Looks great in the OD/natural scheme.

  7. 🙂 … Greetings … 🙂 :
    Sharp looking Mustang Paul, well done representation of the OD scheme.

Leave a Reply