Great masking and paint session, Colin @coling
A pity the paint came loose at the tail section.

Thanks, John. I take the mishaps as they come. I am fine with small areas to fix, as long as the damage can be localized. I may post pics of how to fix it this time. Might be worth seeing for those working with these paints.

Great use of silly putty and spectacular painting results so far, my friend @coling!

Thanks, John @johnb and Spiros @fiveten. I have some more work done on the P-51 this week. More boring pictures of new variations in mummy wrap with paper, tape and silly putty.

The final result is good, though. White ID stripes done on the wings and tail with no damage to the finish. I also painted the spinner parts - all in Tamiya Flat White. I am leaving on the rear part of the masking to do the repair work on the tail now (retouching metal finish). After that, I will do the white nose section and fuselage D-Day stripes. Those will be tricky, especially to preserve the metal coat and also leave just the right gap/outline for the decals. Not sure how much work I will get done today as I am packing away models for Heritagecon 15 tomorrow. Wish me luck (even if I don't build for contests). 🙂

The white ID stripes as well as the spinner look verty nice, Colin @coling
As said by Spiros @fiveten, all the time spent on masking is not in proportion to the amount of time spent for painting. It is however an important step.

Thanks, Spiros, John and Tom. I have made some good progress on some of the trickier painting details this weekend. As explained earlier, I had to fix the peeled metalizer on the tail. I wanted a flawless finish with no chance of a visible border around the peeled areas after repainting. The only way to be sure of this was to scrape all the existing metal areas up to the closest panel line right down to the plastic. Since it is all acrylic this was easy to do with a toothpick, being very careful not to scrape past the panel line. Cleaning was very successful. I then reapplied black primer and semi-matte aluminum and it looks as good as new.

Tomorrow I will mask with paper and silly putty and do the scalloped OD border on the leading edge of the tail fin. Speaking of the paper and Silly Putty approach, I did some refining of the scalloped OD demarcation line on the fuselage, masking the OD with a snake of putty and spraying just a touch of metalizer on either side of the cowling. I then did most of the white nose area with by removing each cowling panel and masking the edge with a very thin piece of Tamiya tape with glue worn off. I covered the rest of the panels with silly putty to make sure I would not lift metalizer paint. I wasn't going to risk the kind of damage that happened to the tail. That worked. I went from a Silly Putty mummy wrap to a nice clean line. When the cowlings were refitted to airframe, the white areas lined up nicely. Last bit for the evening was to spray clear coat to the spinner pieces and prop. I will leave these parts to dry overnight before assembling the prop and spinner. Tomorrow I will also do the last part of the white nose band on the complex shape of the lower nose panel. This will be more difficult to get right so I want to approach it with my full concentration. That's it for now, hope it all looks good to you so far. Thanks for watching.

This is some intricate paintwork, @coling