George R Blair Jr (@gblair)
Thanks for the compliments. It is a lot easier for me building them this way. It saves me a lot of time when it comes to painting them, mainly with clean up time with the air brush in between colors. I take a lot of notes for the specific aircraft I intend to build, and place them in the box with the parts. Plus when I am building them, it becomes a lot easier and faster to do several at the same time, assembly line fashion just as you mentioned.

Please stay tuned as the "pony kids" graduate from grade to grade. I think you will like the updates. 🙂

Spiros Pendedekas (@fiveten)
John vd Biggelaar (@johnb)
Thanks gents ! I am very pleased with how the floors look now. I did make some good progress. Tonight I made some more, with painting the color Black on these Mustangs. I also started working on the single Eduard Mustang, so please stay tuned !

David Odenwald (@kahu)
Thanks for the heads up about the decals. I have an old set of Aero Master decals for Yeager and Anderson's Mustangs. Both of them are for the later P-51D- 15NA versions with the filleted tail section that they flew. Since these are some old decals, I might have to look for a set of them.

I scratch build 1/6 scale electric flying RC models mostly from the WW1 era. I'm more of a builder than a flier though, as my flying skills are not all that great. I always look for different things that could work in ways other than what they were originally intended for. I'm stoked about how the sand paper worked on the floor boards.

Thank you all !

Please stay tuned for tonight's update... It's coming right up.

Today I sprayed the color Black on the various Mustangs in the Kindergarten. I also opened up the Eduard box, and began painting the parts for this Mustang too.

Boy what a big difference between the new Eduard Mustang, and the much older Tamiya kit. Now I'm not knocking the Tamiya Mustang at all...so please don't think that. It's simply starting to show it's age now, when compared to the latest / "greatest wunderkits". The Airfix is also a nice kit, and so far I am liking how it assembles. It too is better than the Tamiya as far as the details go. But I have yet to actually glue the fuselage sections together. This is likely where the Tamiya kit will shine.

These are the only pictures I took showing the assembly line style painting of all the parts that would have the color Black sprayed on them.

There were about twice this many parts, I simply was in the zone and failed to take pictures during the process. I had a lot on my mind today.

Louis @lgardner best wishes for your wife.

You are really cranking along on the Mustangs. That Eduard bit with the coolant lines is the bit Tom @tcinla advises gluing to the bottom of the cockpit floor instead of following the instructions. The various breather plates for the nose may need a bit of light sanding to make them fit snug.

Not quite following your production line method while working on the TBD-1 but I am painting a Hasegawa A-4 as a totally spurious NFWS adversary aircraft plus resuming work on an Accurate Miniatures SBD-5 just to have stuff to do while waiting for things to dry on the Devastator.

Very nice progress on the Mustangs, Louis @lgardner
Let's pray that the imaging results are good.

David Odenwald (@kahu)
Thank you for the kind words for my wife. I will follow the advice with the breather plates, and the coolant lines for sure. So far the fit has been spot on with the Eduard Mustang. Late last night I actually got a chance to do some work on it. I have found it easier to build my kits in an assembly line style. It allows me to work on one kit as the paint or glue is drying on another. I have a series of Accurate Miniatures SBD's planned / coming down the pipeline. They are great models, as are the TBF / TBM's they made.

Our local Deland airport was a major training base for the US Navy during WW2. They trained a lot of SBD (and later on Curtiss Helldiver) crews here. I have wanted to build a few Dauntless planes with markings for Deland for quite some time now. For some reason or another this project always gets pushed aside for something else.

In addition to the dive bombers, they also trained fighters here like the F4F Wildcat's early on. As the War progressed, they switched over from the Wildcat, and then concentrated on training F6F's, F4U's. But ironically they went back to training Wildcat crews here for the smaller escort carriers. When this happened, the Corsairs and Hellcats were sent to Daytona Beach and Sanford. The very first air crews to be assigned here at NAS Deland were being trained in Patrol Bombers. They had quite a few VPB units formed here. They flew PBO Hudson's, and PV-1 Ventura's, and later on the "Navalized" version of the B-24 Liberator. I think they were called PB4Y-1s, with the PB4Y-2 Privateer's also being trained here. It was a busy place !

I'll bet your doing some great work on your kits you have underway. I'll check in on your TBD soon. It's been a long day today and I'm exhausted.

Thanks again.

Spiros Pendedekas (@fiveten)
John vd Biggelaar (@johnb)
Thank you my friends. We couldn't ask for anything better. We both sincerely appreciate your thoughts and prayers. This is the best that anyone could ask for. Sincerely we both thank you very much.

George R Blair Jr (@gblair)
I agree with you 100 percent about the Eduard Mustang on all counts. I decided to pull the trigger on another one yesterday evening. I ordered a 1/48 scale F-6 photo recon Mustang "Overtrees" kit, and a set of Eagle Strike decals for the P-51D. I have always wanted to build up the plane that was flown by Captain William Shomo "Snooks 5th / Flying Undertaker".

This decal set I picked up is exactly what was needed to do this, and it comes with a cool looking set of Korean War Mustang decals too.

The plane Shomo flew was a photo recon Mustang, and up until recently when Eduard came out with theirs, it was very hard to make an accurate model of this type of "Recon" Mustang to my knowledge. It's how the cameras were mounted into the fuselage that is hard to do. I am very impressed with the newest Eduard kits.

Last night I was able to do some work on the Eduard Mustang, and so far the building experience has been right on par with the recent FM-2 Wildcat.

Thank you for the kind words. This cancer thing has been an emotional roller coaster for both of us. It seems like whenever she has anything happen that is out of the ordinary, we immediately think the cancer could be back. It's so hard not to, even though we both try to remain positive through this. We know several other people who have been battling with cancer, and they too have similar thoughts. I guess this happens to people a lot more than we thought it did. So we try to keep a happy face on, and always march forward, even when it is hard to do so at times.

Please stay tuned as I have an update coming right up. Yes there is some good news to report.

Thank you all VERY much for the kind thoughts and prayers.

More good news...
Late last night I managed to get some work done on the Eduard Mustang. This one will be the Donald Duck plane, as flown by a pilot named Emerson. He was killed on Christmas Day, and I hope to have this model completed and posted as a tribute to him on Christmas Day. Time will tell.

Here are some pictures of what I did. I have not had too much bench time lately. Doctors / imaging visits, yard work, a few "honey do's" and spending some good quality time with the misses took a good part of our time lately. We rode our bicycles a lot too. That was fun.

On some Mustangs, they were covered with an aluminum skin that was anodized with a clear protective coating to prevent corrosion. Painting was not necessary. I decided to try and replicate this effect with this Mustang. I painted the upper wheel wells with Molotow chrome.

The inside of the fuselage was also painted this way. I sprayed it in the tail wheel well area, and the areas where the radiator and oil coolers were located.

I assembled the tail wheel framework.

It was painted with a home brew color I made using some Tamiya acrylic. This is a Yellow / Green Zinc Chromate color. This is very true to color of the real / original parts.

This gives you some idea of how the wheel wells should look when completed. The frames were Yellow Green ZC and the skin was bare aluminum color. This looks pretty close to how some Mustangs were done. Not all were like this.

The signaling lights were installed in the lower wing half. They were painted from the inside using clear Tamiya paints. This is the correct order of the color for these lights.

They look pretty cool with some light held up behind them. I was curious here... 🙂

The main landing gear wells were assembled in the same fashion as the tail wheel are was. This is the end result. It also gave me another idea to use on the remaining Tamiya Mustangs in the Kindergarten, and it would involve a minor change to how I altered the existing kit wheel wells. I'll try it out when the new F6 Mustang Overtrees kit arrives in a few days.. I'll be sure to post up the results here.

This shows what the wing looks like at the moment.

The landing gear bay was glued in place, and the ammunition shell ports were glued as well.

This kit has had exceptional fit so far, and it is every bit as nice as the new tool FM-2 was that I built last.

I cut the upper wing halves from the parts tree. I have to trim off the injection stubs and get these parts ready to install.

I am asking if anyone has built one of these.

If so, was the fit along the fuselage fillet to wing root good ?

Can I build this as a complete wing assembly with the top and bottom halves glued together ?

Or should I glue the upper wing halves to the fuselage first, eliminating any gaps at this joint ?

If you know, I would love to hear from you.

Thanks in advance.

Also, once again I want to thank everyone for the kind words and thoughts / prayers for my wife.

As always, comments are encouraged.

Louis @lgardner

You should have no real issues with the gluing the Eduard wing top and bottom together followed later by attaching the fuselage. Test fitting my completed RF-51D wing to the still unglued fuselage halves reveals only a sliver of gap at wing root.

As for Capt. Shomo's F-6D Mustang you may want to download the instructions from Eduard for F-6D/RF-51 kit BFC103. Two of the three marking options are for Shomo's Mustang 44-14841. Option A is a bare metal Mustang with only Shomo's name, victory markings, and a black 66 on the tail above the serial number. Option B is the same plane but with front 2/3rds of H39 and tip of vertical stabilizer painted yellow. The 66 on the tail is now yellow with black shadow. And on the right side of the nose is the name "Snooks 5th." Aircraft was lost on 5 Mar 1945 during an attack on enemy facilities near Cattagoaman. The pilot, Lt. Huffman, was killed and he was laid to rest at the American cemetery near Manila.

Eduard reissued the decals for P-51D-5 44-13317 VF*B in their Weekend Edition P-51D-5 Mustang kit #84172.

Hope the good news keep rolling your way.

@lgardner: With the Eduard kit, if you attach the "roof part" of the wheel well to the bottom of the cockpit floor where it ultimately fits, rather than to the top of the wheel well, and cut off the little tab so you don't have to "fish around" for position, the attachment of wing sub-assembly to fuselage sub-assembly is much much easier. That's the only "fiddle" thing in the kit so you solve the fiddly.