I managed to get a LOT done over the past few days. Here are some pictures I took along the way. Lets start out with the cover plate. I found a decent picture on the web, where the person lightened up the exposure a little bit. Then I zoomed in using the camera in my cell phone. As best I can tell, there's a decent chance this plane had the solid cover as mentioned previously. Here is the zoomed in picture I'm talking about.
Earlier I had completed the majority of one wing. I used Bare Metal Foil to replicate the underside of the aluminum wing skin.
The other wing I wanted to make it look different. So I painted the inside skin portion using Yellow ZC from the Testors little square bottle.
I had previously built and painted the inner wing ribs and spars.
Then since I was painting the Yellow ZC, I sprayed the outside of the tail wheel well on both planes.
This is how it looks from a different angle.
I sprayed the inside of the fuselage near the tail wheel well on both planes.
Then I assembled the upper and lower wing halves, after gluing the ribs in place.
You can see the difference between these two.
On the top side they look identical.
The Mustang had all kinds of variations as to how / why they were internally painted. It depended upon the production date, the plant and even as to what they had available. Steven Towle shared a great link a while ago about "Sierra Sue". This Mustang has been painstakingly restored and they went so far as to have reproduction rivets manufactured, and paint roller stencils to show which manufacturer the aluminum sheets came from.
Now I have both wings assembled, waiting for the final sanding and polishing sessions.
Next I started checking the fit of the tail wheel well / radiator tunnel into the fuselage sections.
Here you can see the radiator tunnels.
Once I spray the interior of the tunnel, and apply some foil in a few places, these parts are ready to install into the fuselage.
I wanted to install the exhaust shrouds on "Cripes A Mighty III". In the book I have, they have several photos that show these were painted Blue, just like the nose of the plane. So I carefully masked the nose sections on both planes, then sprayed on some Flat White to use as a base. I use Flat White only because it dries much faster. This was done primarily for the upcoming yellow color.
Once the white had dried sufficiently, I sprayed the noses using a custom mix of Blue, using the formula and base colors as described in the Eagle Edition book.
Here is a picture showing the fuselage halves as the paint is drying.
Here you can see how the exhaust shrouds were glued in place before any painting was done.
On LOU IV, I will have to go about this a little bit differently because the shrouds remained in a bare metal state. Her is another Mustang photo I took and it shows the stainless steel shrouds nicely. Ironically this is also a Blue Nose from Bodney...
I painted the propeller spinner and back plate, along with the small air intake under the nose
as well as the blue portion of the nose.
I have read online where the decal for the Port side of LOUI IV, named Athleen, is translucent. So I decided to paint the area behind the decal using white, to help keep the bleed through to a minimum.
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1. ATHLEEN name will go here.
Here you can see both sides of the fuselage on LOUI IV.
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1. ATHLEEN name will go here.
I'm calling it a night. As always, Comments are encouraged.
