North American P-51
What a nice kit.
That was Bert Kinzey's summation of the Tamiya A-10 in his Detail & Scale volume. I think it applies to the Accurate Miniatures P-51 series as well. The first three kits released by the then start-up company are now thirty years old. I remember walking into the LHS not having so much as a hint that the new company had these ready to hit the shelves. That store now gone, always had an open box of newly released kits to allow shoppers to see the sprues. The kit was impressive to say the least, and it still has that wow factor.
I built this one out of the box except for the cannon barrels. Those came from a Monogram Hawker Hurricane. The decals are from the kit except for the fuselage cocardes - so much for out of the box. I followed recommendations I found in review articles and glued the nose halves to their respective fuselage halves then glued the fuselage halves together. Currently I have another started with a True Details replacement cockpit, and Master Model cannon barrels.
The main gear doors should be up for the P-51 employing the Allison powerplant, and I will likely do that on the next build.
Excellent Mustang, Russel!
Thank you Spiros. I enjoyed the build process.
That' s a fine looking Mustang, Russell @russjurco
May I ask what brand of clear coat you used, I really like the matt looks of it.
Thanks John. It was the Micro Scale clear flat. I should have applied it over the weathering powder, but I didn’t. So the flat appearance is likely the result of applying fairly closely matched powders. They were produced by a company called Bragdonent.
Yeah time flies faster than any Mustang ever did. Great job on that Pony.
Thanks Bill. Yeah, I couldn’t believe it when I did the math. It is something like the first time I realized I could not really refer to myself as middle aged.
Very nice early Mustang. Always enjoyed building the AM Mustangs.
Agreed. All of them make up into nice representations of the actual aircraft. I do wish they would not have split the tailplane from the fuselage on the B&C models.
Excellent build. I jumped on the AM bandwagon many years ago and built them all.
🙂 Thank you. You have me beat by a country mile there. I hope to get the B-25 and TBF-1C built one day.
That is a good lookin' Pony! Well done!
Thanks Greg. I always look at a finished kit and wonder where I can improve the result next time. Hopefully my skills continue to improve even at my advanced age.
Nicely done Mustang, I'm a big fan of the Allison Mustangs and have all tha Accurate Miniatures early Mustangs. I can't wait to see your other P-51 all finished up.
Thanks Clint. The next one will be a Mustang Ia. I will need to determine whether the gray should be the “mixed” gray or the official ocean gray. In the event you missed it, take a look at the Halberd Mustang I. I bought one as a result of seeing a review here on iModeler by Tom Cleaver. It is a beautiful rendition of the earliest Mustang.
Lovely finish on this one. Thanks for sharing!
Thank you Brian. It is an attempt at weathering, and I hope to improve on that aspect of the hobby in the future. I have noticed that the photos I post end up a little darker with a bit more color saturation. I will attempt to dial those back in future articles.