As is evident, there’s a lot of putty, here:

And that requires a lot of sanding. Before wadding the putty on, I covered adjacent areas with tape to keep as much of the surface detail as possible…and then sanded:

After sanding, panel lines had to be rescribed. I used Tamiya’s tape to lay down the line where I wanted it to be:

Then the rest of the lines obscured by putty and sanding were scribed back in:

Probably because of the previous sanding under the nose, the fit of the wing-plane also needed putty and sanding:

To finish additions of fuselage parts, I added the oil-cooler door (and trust me, if you want to eat up a couple of hours building this bird, drop that door inside the fuselage – a couple of times – to really spin yourself up):

With sanding accomplished, it was time to start putting back the raised details that were casualties of sanding. Below you can see to the right of center where I’ve added a stub of stretched sprue to begin replicating the dzus fasteners used to hold the panels in place and how I did that:

Then I got to do that a lot:

With the stubs in place, careful sanding was needed to bring them closer to the surface without assaulting more panel lines:

Turning my attention to the wings, I started by adding drops of superglue to areas that needed to be sharper. Where the flaps were cut out and that opening met the wing root flare, the join was rounded. Because that area is mostly putty, I needed to make those areas harder so that I could get the sharp angles I needed in a puttied edge that is lousy at unsupported areas. I had been using the standard thin superglue, getting a blob/drop in place, and waiting an hour or so for it to harden enough to file/sand/cut to its final shape. Back when, I’d had good luck with superglue accelerator. Put the glue in place, spray with accelerator, and instant hardness (albeit at the cost of some bonding strength, but since this wasn’t structural…) is achieved.

Well. Either my memory is faulty (and if so, this instance would certainly not be unique) or the formulation of accelerators has changed. I don’t remember accelerator dissolving the surface of the plastic…and that’s just what happened. So after putting the model back down (from where I was ALL wound up to throw it against the wall), I sanded down the texture created when I tried to wipe off the excess accelerator with a paper towel:

I had intended on using the shaped and fitted kit canopy as a buck to vacuform clear sheet over. I had also intended on putting a framework inside the clear, so first I pulled some .010″ (.254mm) over the buck, and then some .010″ (.254mm) clear over both:

Nice idea, and I probably could have gotten it to work. But in the process of fitting the clear, I realized that the edge of the trimmed part, which had started out at a thickness of .010″ (.254mm) and due to stretching was probably thinner, didn’t offer very much surface area for glue (I haven’t yet figured out which type of glue would work) to offer a secure bond. Squadron Products offers very nice vacuformed canopies for a wide variety of kits and I decided to go that route instead (I think):

In looking at the part, I realized that this buck had been formed by gluing the fuselage halves together, gluing the canopies on, then cutting out the areas of the fuselage around the canopy, offering a much larger surface for glue to work on (and this is a great idea that I’ll be using myself in future builds!). But since I’d already gone well past grafting this clear part onto the kit as intended, I had to trim the canopy to fit:

I left a flange on the front canopy part for gluing. The right-side canopy as well as the right side rear window won’t be separated, but the top and left side canopy will. I haven’t cut them free yet because they work well to locate the rear canopy windows in their respective openings. At present the idea is to glue the canopy in front securely down using superglue (with the requisite crossing of body appendages that the glue doesn’t fog the clear parts), then extending the superglue down the right side (which isn’t going to be opened, as per the way these aircraft were used in the field), and around both rear windows. I’ll seal the bottom left side canopy with white glue to keep any paint from blowing into the cockpit.

At this point I turned my attention to the wings.

This will be a short post because though I spent a fair amount of time diddling with the flaps, not many photos were taken.

With the flaps now dimensioned and shaped, I made the molds (when I pour the rubber, I try to mold other items I know I’m going to need; in this photo, I’m also molding propeller parts):

About this time I noticed how lumpy the rubber stayed. Usually, this all levels out as the rubber cures. Not this time. Why? Well, it’s because I absolutely SUCK at math. Suffice to say that I suspect I put about 10% more hardener into the mix than I should have…and it may have been more. But, having poured the damned stuff, I decided to see if I could pull a usable casting from a really lousy mold. The answer was, “sorta.” One of the flaps’ corners is bulged on both sides:

No, it wasn’t from misalignment of the mold halves since this mold doesn’t have “halves.” It’s because of this:

That, ladies, gentleman, and children of all ages, is a bubble. It’s a damned big bubble. I sat there for a while trying to figure out how I got a bubble. The best I can come up with is that due to some idiot (me) putting in far too much hardener, the rubber set up in the vacuum chamber before that damned big bubble could migrate to the surface where it would pop. But that doesn’t explain why it’s a bubble under pressure. And it’s obviously pressurized, otherwise it wouldn’t bulge like that. That bubble wasn’t there when I broke down the mold box. That bubble wasn’t there when I filled the mold with resin. And that bubble should have collapsed when I put the mold/resin into the pressure pot and left it there for 24 hours under 55 psi (121.25kg), either. But there the bubble stayed and, for some reason, expanded. How the intercourse it did that I still have no idea…and I have less on an idea as to why it did that on both sides.

I took a sharp knife and cut a hole into the bubble to allow the (mysterious) pressure to escape and tried another resin pour to see if I could pull a useful casting out of this mystery mold…and I did.

The flaps required EXTENSIVE reworking to both fit and droop the way I want them to. The reason there are no pictures here is that some idiot (me again) forgot to take pictures of that TEDIOUS AND DRAWN OUT PROCESS. I spent the second half of last month figuring out why the flaps didn’t fit or droop properly, which is why this post is going to be so short.

But I got them to fit and droop.

In the process of all that fitting, the resin flaps were handled and manipulated. A lot. This resulted in me wearing away the corners of the resin parts. To put back the shape I used gap-filling superglue:

Once the glue had solidified I trimmed and rough-shaped the corners. After letting the parts sit overnight, because superglue gets much harder over time, I did the final shaping and sanding:

Having crossed that task off the list, I added the elevators, wing, and belly scoop. I also added the landing gear strut doors temporarily (using white glue) to act as masks for the landing gear wells and so that when the underside gets paint, the strut doors get painted (and weathered) at the same time so everything matches:

Accurate Miniatures, the company the produced this kit, has a reputation for well-fitting kits. Perhaps it was because this kit sat in a hot attic for 13 years and things warped/shifted, but the fit on this kit ain’t all that grand. Substantial putty is going to be required to get the proper fit, so the first coat of putty has been applied. Once that sets up overnight, I’ll begin the sanding process that I’m sure will lead to the next application of putty.

I will repeat as necessary:

I added scrap styrene and started removing the excess until I had it where I wanted it, then I did the same thing (more carefully with the Dremel) with the other flap and both put back and added surface details:

I dry-fit the bottom wing to the fuselage and noticed that I had made the cut in the lower surface in the wrong place. What I had was straight and to clear the belly scoop when the flaps come down, it has to be curved, so I removed that section from the flaps and returned it to the lower wing:

I also needed to thin the section of the wing where the flap meets it. The top piece has been done, the lower piece is there for reference:

All the Mustangs (at least through the D variant) have three lights under the right wing. Rather than do the easy (and probably sane) thing and just paint the molded details, I decided I’d drill out the lights, replace it with clear sprue, and back paint them the proper colors:

A section of clear sprue was chucked into a drill and spun slowly while I used files, emery boards, and fine sandpaper to create a tapered section large enough to fill the hole:

I traced the contact area with styrene cement, cut the clear part flush, and then sanded them up to and including polishing them (which I also did with the lens faces that can be seen) and then applied the proper color paint:

And as these things go, I rather doubt anyone who doesn’t know how that was assembled will ever notice…

With the lights, guns, and flaps all attended to, it was time to add the resin landing gear well tub and glue the wing tops to the bottom:

With the wing tops in place, I could now finish fitting the curved section of the flaps and trim the lower surfaces back so that they droop at the correct (looking) angle, then I added the detail(s) that I lost while puttying the scratches, sanding the added plastic, and added the rivet detail:

Before I add these parts to the wing, I’ll make a mold of them, pour resin, and use the resin parts (this way I don’t have to do this again for the next Allison Mustang build).

While I was doing the dry-fitting, I noticed other fit problems. Where the lower wing met the fuselage, the fuselage was too narrow (or the wing was too wide, but it was easier to fix the fuselage’s width). There was also too much of a gap where the wing meets the faring and the wing where the flaps were removed needed to be fit to the curve of the faring, now that the flap that did that isn’t there anymore. To fix the narrow fuselage, I diddled about using a piece of styrene tubing as a spreader until I had the fuselage properly aligned with the wing:

To fix the alignment of the wing/flap area, I used a piece of masking tape to hold the wing’s surface in proper alignment, then used scrap styrene as feeler gauges (you Millennials can google it) until everything was in contact inside the wing and the surface was where it needed to be, then I glued the shims in place:

The wing root farings are thin aluminum. That area of the kit isn’t thin at all so that needed to be thinned to scale. With the wing bottom in place, I outlined the area that needed to be removed:

In the process, and as I expected, I cut completely through that area of the fuselage. I used my homemade structural putty to fill the voids:

Time to turn my efforts towards the wings but that gap in the fuselage in front of the cockpit just sat there…looking at me. Fine, since it was going to be like that, I’ll fix it. Sheet stock was added and trimmed and now the coaming is ready to paint:

With that annoyance dealt with, my efforts did go towards the wings…for about five minutes. Then something else started demanding attention. This kit had sat in a hot attic for about 13 years. Evidently, this caused things to warp (other than my mind) so when the fuselage was being assembled, I realized I needed the addition of putty to smooth things out, so I added putty to smooth things out:

Right. Wings. Let’s get to those now. The first thing that jumped out in my eye was the apertures in the leading edges of both wings for the landing lights. The P-51 was the only Mustang to have a landing light in each wing. Though Accurate Miniatures made the attempt to thin this section, it was still far too thick, so I had to thin that area to a more scale thickness:

And then I noticed that the landing lights are angled downward (which, given the location of the ground to a taxiing or landing aircraft, makes sense), meaning there is less of a cutout in the upper wing surface than there is in the lower:

My initial intent was to build scale lights (that’s what that cylinder in the photo below-left is the start of). Then I realized that I don’t need scale lights, I need something that looks like scale lights. So I decided to see if easily constructed lights would look correct (reminding myself that building a model is not engineering, where things have to be correct…it’s modeling, where things have to look correct). I started by finding a punch of the appropriate (as in, looks right) diameter. I punched out a disc of .020″ (.508mm) plastic. Then I centered the disc over the next smallest die and punched the center out so that I would end up with a pair of bezels (he says using 26 words that made it sound easy and carefully not mentioning how many off-center discs got tossed):

Aligning the bezels to the holes was easy; I used the punch as the alignment tool:

I cut the two apart and then roughly placed one inside the wing to see how things would look (not bad) and how things would fit (not good):

I carefully thinned the area where the landing lights go on both wings:

I placed a landing light in place and dropped the upper wing where it goes and was pleased with how it looked:

Now I needed the landing lights. For a reflective surface, I took a disposable aluminum baking pan and sanded and polished it, then I cut the polished area out and glued it to the back of the landing light, using a fine marker to make a dot for the “bulb”:

To make the lens, I punched out a piece of clear butyrate, put it in place, and was pleased with the effect:

Moving inward from there, I wanted to fix the armament. The P-51 was the only Mustang to have 20mm cannons (Hispano Suiza units with 500 rounds per gun) and those were fairly large, resulting in much of the barrel being shrouded where it extended out of the wings. The kit’s “barrels” have what I take are cooling fins along the section of the barrels that aren’t shrouded. Some of my resources showed P-51s with those fins and some showed P-51s without those fins (since my attempts at making fins to fit were so frustrating and BAD, I’ll be making barrels without them). The kit-supplied guns were really bad so it that means that I’m not using those parts. Instead, I used .032 (.082mm) brass tubing that I widened the holes in. The references (see…sometimes I consult them) show a lip around the muzzles. I drilled the center out of .047″ (1.1939mm) styrene rod:

After doing that eight times, I ended up with a decent set of 20mm gun barrels (the muzzle band will be aligned better later):

And then I drove myself crazy(er) concocting elaborate and complicated means of getting the barrels mounted and aligned. Thankfully, before I started burning through materials and/or screwing up the only set of wings I have for this variant, I hit on a Clever Idea ™. I noticed that there is a slight lip where the barrels meet the shrouds on the actual aircraft. Since I had the .047″ (1.1939mm) rod right there, as well as recent (successful!) experience center-drilling them, I’d use the drilled styrene rod as mounting sleeves! I also made a fence so that the barrels extended the proper distance from the shrouds (that turned out to be unnecessary, so I didn’t do it for the other wing/gun setup):

I didn’t attach the barrels at this point. Having them removable (they just slide in and out like…ahm…yeah…never mind) will make painting them a lot easier.

A word about dropped landing gear doors and flaps…

I’ve read references that stated the reason the doors on Merlin-powered Mustangs drooped was because they lacked the mechanical locks that kept Allison-powered doors up once hydraulic pressure in the system bleed off. I’ve read references that said the opposite. I’ve also read the same things for the flaps, both one way and then the other. From what I’ve been able to figure out, the flaps would stay up unless someone pulled the T-handle that released the hydraulic pressure from the hydraulic system (the reason given was so that nobody would step on the relatively fragile flaps while they were in the up position and thereby damage them). It seems the landing gear doors are still a matter of mystery (at least to me) as to when and why they would drop down. (If I ever come up with a definitive answer, I’ll come back and edit this.)

For whatever reason they drop down, most of my references show the flaps down regardless of which variant of Mustang pictured and the landing gear doors down on Merlin-powered Mustangs. That’s how I will build them and that starts with this one.

The Verlinden cockpit detail set also included a set of flaps, so I thought I’d use those. The first thing I noticed was that the flaps weren’t long enough, which meant I had to add plastic to the ends of them:

And then I noticed that the resin flaps were about half as thick as they should be where the flap meets the wing:

Well, then…looks like I’m going to cut the flaps out of the wing and make those work instead:

First I carefully glued just the flap sections together so that the profile would be established. To keep the kerf as small as possible, I used a panel scriber and MANY passes to separate the flaps from the wings.

And here I insert a warning about scribing tools. I like them better for most panels than using the back of a knife tip or needle because the knife tip is often too wide and the needle raises a lip on either side of the resulting groove that has to be sanded away. I’ve reshaped my scriber to be about as thin as I can get it and still maintain its structural rigidity and most of the time it works quite well. But it’s a tool. Any tool can be misused and if you look at the above photo closely, you’ll see a diagonal scrape to the right of center on the flap. This is what happens when a person gets impatient and tries to take too big a gouge out of the plastic too soon. Several light passes are MUCH BETTER than trying to take a lot of plastic out with one pass. Several light passes do create a groove that keeps the tip of the scriber from doing what I did with it, having it wander and gouge a surface that should not be gouged. So what my impatience has done, as it so often does, is make more work for me. The errant gouge needs to be filled. ::bangs head slowly on desk::

Look closely at the flap in the above picture again, but this time look at the curved section on the left of the flap. The actual flap fits under the faring at the wing root. The kit part meets the faring and, were I building this with the flaps up, that would be fine. So that area needs to have plastic added so that the surface of the flap is even across its width (after much scraping and sanding, of course):

If you look closely at the lower picture at the edge near the plastic addition, you can see where the TINIEST of brushes by a spinning Dremel tool’s bit took a gouge out of the plastic. So that will need to be fixed with another addition of plastic (and since fine motor control had deserted me at this point, I glued on more plastic and called it a night):

Once upon a time, there was a California-based company called Model Technologies that produced some very fine photo-etched details. I was fortunate enough to pick up a few of their items way back when because they have since gone out of business and if anyone has picked up their line, I can’t find them. What made MT’s stuff so nice (other than the fact that it was a damned good product) was that they used stainless steel for many of their products. This is a good thing because I’m using MT’s seat belt buckle set and it’s VERY SMALL. Brass of this size would be more fragile than useful. Stainless steel is strong enough to survive the manipulations required of them:

And from my initial attempt to convert a P-51B to an Allison Mustang, I had a seat cushion I’d made from a sheet of .060 styrene. I checked its fit and though slightly smaller than I would make today, I decided it was certainly close enough so I painted it and glued it in place:

With the MT buckles, the harnesses are replicated using paper that is then threaded through the buckles the way the actual harness was threaded. The first paper I tried was paper towels from a public restroom:

One of the things I liked about this paper was it was already about the color I wanted. But I discovered that once soaked in dilute white glue, the physical properties of the paper itself was too loose to survive any manipulation, coming apart instead:

What I ended up using was the paper from a white Post-It pad (though I’d also considered using the paper of a dollar bill because of its high linen content):

Pleased with how it turned out (and equally pleased it didn’t come apart once soaked with dilute white glue!), I went on to the FIDDLY task of threading all the straps through buckles and getting them ready to paint. And speaking of “small,” the latching mechanism on the end of one of the lap straps is not only FREAKIN’ TINY, the loop has to be turned ninety degrees and the tail curved and THEN glued on:

Once done with the tedium of the straps, they were all painted and glued into position:

This is an illustration about why I go through all this trouble. In the next photo, the seat on the left is the kit-supplied part, the center is the seat that came with the resin detail set, and then obviously the one I’m using:

While the acrylic paint cured a bit, I turned my attention to the tail wheel assembly. The first thing I noticed is that this assembly is molded as one piece…and it’s obviously so. So before I can use it/them, I wanted to separate the wheel and tire from the strut:

I used the tail wheel part from my sacrificial kit as well. From one part I cut the tire away and re-sculpted the strut to the proper L-shape, and from the other part I cut away the strut to end up with just the tire:

I have plans to build other Allison Mustangs, most of them are Accurate Miniature kits, and that means all the tail wheels are molded the way this one was. Being lazy, I didn’t feel like going through this process six or seven more times, so I made a mold of the tire and strut, poured resin, and will be using that instead.

It seems that all solutions create new problems. I poured the resin for the tail wheel assembly, put it under 55 pounds (121.25kg) of pressure, and de-molded it the next day. See that white band on the strut? That’s a sodding bubble:

Okay, so that means I can either try another pour or fix this one. One thing I am more than lazy is cheap. Doing another pour means wasting resin (the smallest increment that can be mixed is an ounce…and I have NO need of that much resin just for this little sodding bubble). That means I cut the strut where the bubble is, add a disc of styrene (.015″ (.381mm) as it turned out), and finish it to invisibility:

At this point what’s driving the build is the need to shoot parts with aluminum paint. The end goal is to have everything painted so that I can join the fuselage halves. The rear landing gear strut needs to be painted aluminum, but so do a few more parts. So the next step is to get everything that’s going to be painted aluminum detailed and finished, and that starts with the main landing gear legs.

Aside from cleaning up seam lines, I also needed to drill out a couple of mounting protrusions and then turn them into two separate protrusions instead of one ridge as it had been molded. The needle tip points to the unmodified ridge and the finished strut is next to it:

Then the extension scissors needed to be removed and replaced with more accurate photo-etched parts:

Next step was to add the brake lines. I used annealed copper wire (it bends easier) for the brake lines. Before the brake lines were added, I painted the steel section of the strut “steel” and then masked those areas off and then glued the wire in place before adding two bolts to each strut (if you look closely you’ll see the purple bolts):

With the struts detailed, it was finally time to toss paint at the parts, 75% flat aluminum and 25% semi-gloss black. I also loaded the airbrush with “rubber” paint and did the tires:

And while I had the “rubber” paint open, the curved section of the brake lines are rubber hose, so those got painted as well:

All the aluminum-painted parts were treated to a smoke-gray wash and the masking tape removed:

Then I needed to address the spokes. Once upon a time, I would have (and did) cut out the openings between the spokes. Then again, once upon a time my hands were much steadier than they’ve become. And even the painting showed me (again) that my hands are no longer quite (or even remotely) as steady as they were in my yout’.

I’m often asked by people how I can paint such TINY details. Being the smartass that I am, I tell them, “Carefully,” but there actually is a trick to it. Because the hands ain’t no longer steady, coloring between the lines ain’t no longer possible:

But there’s NO way I’m letting that kind of sloppy paint job stand. So when painting the tiny details, I’ll add the paint the details call for. Then I note the slop. Then I use the appropriately sized brush (usually TINY) to put back the paint my twitching digits slopped onto areas that the paint shouldn’t be on. Sometimes it takes several back-and-forth applications, but if I stick with it, I end up with something that isn’t sloppy. This is the same part as in the above photo:

One of the things that needed re-sculpting was the edge of the hood (aka, coaming) above the instrument panel. On the actual aircraft, there’s a hose that’s slit and slid over the edge of the aluminum. I’d briefly considered removing the molded-in ridge but the surface area the glue can work is VERY thin and stood a good (or bad, really) chance of dissolving it. Rather than go down that hole, I re-sculpted the areas of the lip that was out of scale. Below the section on the left has been done and the section on the right not done (sorry about the blurred photo…it was the best I could manage):

This variant of the Mustang had a separate door for the oil cooler and the kit provided the part. What the kit didn’t provide was a scale-thickness lip to it, so I thinned out that trailing edge of the oil cooler door:

The last details to paint were the radios and those were done in semi-gloss black and chipped paint added, the seat and front bulkhead (with rudder pedals) were then glued into position:

With everything painted, it was time to begin the installation process of the various sub-assemblies so that the fuselage halves could be joined. It started by assembling the cockpit and installing the instrument panel:

The first thing I did was to attach the engine cowlings to the fuselage sides. I’d debated joining the sides before attaching the cowlings but I decided that I would rather deal with one seam in an area that was easier to work than having that seam and the join where the cowlings met the fuselage. It took some time, fitting, additional invective, and more fitting before everything lined up as well as I could get it and then things were glued in and together:

And in SPITE of all the careful fitting, heating resin and bending, there was still a fit problem; the front area of the cockpit floor was too low and you can see the gap between the floor and side (and the joystick was far too tall, so that got removed, trimmed, and re-glued). So there was more resin heating before I could glue and clamp things into the best fit I could attain:

With invective, heating, bending, and gluing accomplished, I am now here:

Now the seams all need to be dealt with. In some places I’m going to add sheet styrene and some places are going to need putty.

My original intention was to scratch-build the instrument panel from sheet styrene and the Waldron instrument faces. And though I got a decent start with it, what I ended up with would not work. I estimate that I was about six scale inches short of the space I needed to be able to use a scratch-built instrument panel. I could have thinned out the sides of the cockpit where the panel mounts, but that would have left me with extremely thin plastic and I didn’t want to go there. The PE set has a very nice photo-etched panel with a sheet of gauge faces printed on what I suspect is acetate and that’s the route I decided to take.

The P-51 panel has an inner panel that isn’t really attached to the surround (there are brackets behind the actual panel that it mounts to). The PE set had a two-piece panel that nicely replicated the original’s panel, it would just some tweaking (and as it turned out, fitting) to work.

One of the (many) interesting features of the P-51 was that it had no hard-points under the wings from which to hang bombs or drop tanks. I’ve already removed the salvo controls (those things that transform something being carried to something being dropped) but there are three toggle switches that have to come off the panel itself. Those three toggles are the “master arm” switch and one toggle each to arm the nose and tail fuses of bombs. Easy to not put something there, but I also had to plug the holes where the toggles go as well as trim down the switch panel itself, then to add the wire to replicate the bats of the toggle switches. With that done, I mixed flat black (75%) with gloss white (25%) to achieve scale color representation. Once the panel was painted, I used a white colored pencil to VERY lightly add highlights to the upper edges of the instrument bezels. The areas of the gauges faces that aren’t black are clear. If I want the gauge details to show (AND I DO), they need to be painted white, so I covered the areas of the faces from behind with white paint. I used the watch crystal cement to attach the acetate gauges and superglue to bond the instrument panel’s surround to the panel proper, and then painted the toggle switch bats:

I decided that while I was doing gauges, I would also do the main wing tanks gauges, which are set into the floor. The acetate sheet that came with the PE set also had the fuel tank gauges. An insurmountable problem developed when I used the punch/die set to punch out the gauge faces. There is just enough slop in the punch/die set for the gauge face to not punch cleanly through. Instead, about 75% of the face was separated, but the remaining 25% caused the face to curve inside the die and the punch scraped the instrument detail off.

Once I was done with my (useless but satisfying) invective, I remembered I had a lot of dry-transfer gauge faces in my armor parts stash. All I needed were two basic “quantity” gauge faces (a needle pointing to the left and a series of marks arcing across the top of the face). Once I found what I needed, I also needed to make sure that they were of the proper diameter. I used the PE bezels for that determination.

Did I mention these things are small?:

To use the acetate gauge faces I had to drill a depression for the faces to fit into. And then I discovered I couldn’t use the acetate faces so those depressions had to be filled in with styrene:

The dry-transfer faces were applied and the bezels set in place and glued (I used a very small dab of watch crystal cement to hold the bezels in place because experience has shown me that with parts this small, as soon as I touched the needle with the superglue on it, the small part would stick to it; the watch crystal cement worked perfectly to hold the bezel in place while capillary action moved the superglue from the needle to between the bezel and the floor) (yes…I actually glued something in place so I could glue something in place):

I used the punch/die set to punch out a couple of discs of masking tape which I laid over the bezels to keep them from being painted over. With gauges taken care of, I started work on detailing the sides of the cockpit by adding the control cables of the throttle and propeller pitch controls and the landing gear controls at the bottom of the left panel:

Satisfied with that, it was all ready to paint. I prefer to work with acrylics because clean up is SO much easier; water is the only solvent required. The problem with that is that I couldn’t find the exact interior green color I wanted in acrylic. What I ended up doing was using 75% Tamiya’s “IJN Cockpit green” (“IJN” stands for Imperial Japanese Navy), which is lighter than what the US used, and 25% of Tamiya’s basic green, which is darker than what the US used:

Once I had the mix correct (and added 25% white), it was painting time.

If you consider that a cockpit is a hole in the top of the fuselage that’s then filled with the controls of the aircraft and the pilot’s seat, it’s no great stretch to the realization that light isn’t going to reflect from the floor and the bottoms of the sides of this hole as much as it will from the those items that are in direct light at the top of this hole. My first step to painting the cockpit my green mix was to paint it flat black. The flat black would end up being the base shadow value, and since I’m basically lazy, I decided that all the parts that get painted green would be pre-shaded:

Next was to overshoot the “shadow” with the cockpit green. The landing gear wells are underneath the aircraft and would get the least amount of direct light and would therefore be mostly shadowed with just highlights of green:

The rest of the application of green followed the idea of what areas would reflect the most light and the green was misted on top of the black and then I used aluminum paint to replicate paint wear:

With the cockpit parts shaded, painted, and chipped, it was time to turn my efforts to the seat.

Well, I know I’ve mentioned before that one should refer back to references often. Evidently, I don’t listen to myself (hardly surprising; I’m already nuts and listening to that maniac can only exacerbate a bad situation). I’m sure you’ll notice (more quickly than I did) that the notch in the rib does not line up with the mount for the landing gear leg…and it’s supposed to:

And the problem with that is that all the other notches don’t line up, either. The fix is to remake the ribs. And then make another mold. And THEN cast the sodding things again (I’m getting a great deal of practice with colorful invective).

Since the notches in the ribs are to allow clearance for the landing gear strut/tire to fit inside the wing, maybe using the landing gear/strut to establish that location might be a good idea:

With the proper alignment of the notches established, the whole process of cutting, drilling, and adding the lips got done. Again. After these were done the molding/casting process got done. Again:

There are lots of things about getting old I am not especially thrilled by (it’s a long list, which I have to make because I’m too old to remember), but one of the things that seem to work in my favor (sometimes) is understanding my short-comings (talk about a list) and figuring out ways to work around them. Sometimes I will sit at the bench for many hours and in so doing can remember what I did on one side so that I can do it again on the other. Sometimes I don’t sit at the bench for very long and sometimes days will pass before I get back to it. In that case, I can’t remember how I did what I did (or where the hell I put that damned list). My work-around is when I do something on one side, immediately do it on the other:

And that’s how I detailed the wells. The sections to the inside of the first ribs (as figured from the center) will not be seen once everything is in place:

In reading the Mustang pilot manual, one of the shut-down procedures for the pilot was to release the hydraulic pressure in the system (this would cause the flaps to drop which in turn kept people from walking on them). Evidently, the later “D” models, didn’t have latches inside the gear wells to hold the clam-shell doors up which the Allison Mustangs did have. When the pressure dropped, the latches would keep the clam-shell doors closed and from what I can tell from reference photos, they stayed closed unless the ground crew needed to get in there.

So why am I putting details in that won’t be seen?

Practice and reference, both of which I need, one of which I don’t refer to often enough. And in adding the lines and wiring (copper wire, solder, and lead wool), I see that once again I got the ribs less than correct; some of the holes are wrong, some unneeded, and some in the wrong place. So here is where I get sloppy…

I AIN’T REDOING THE SODDING RIBS/MOLDS/CASTINGS AGAIN. At least, not for this build; before I do another Allison Mustang I will.

So, sloppily, this is where I got, adding the hydraulic cylinders, wiring, lines, etc.:

With this aspect of the build done, it’s time to put this aside (while I figure out how to paint it) and get back to working the cockpit parts.

Since the delivery time from Roll Models was quite long, while I was waiting I figured I’d get after the landing gear wells. That started by sawing out the molded box and start getting what will replicate the main wing spar dimensioned and built. Since I wanted to keep the one accurate detail of the molded-in wells as my dimensional reference, I ended up cutting each well away separately (probably complicating the job).

I used the one correct section of the molded-in landing gear wells as my reference. Once I had access to that section, I used card stock to create a relative template (so-called because I’m going to have to fit this fabrication inside the wing and I’ll do that once I have it in plastic as that’s more rigid and easier to work) and then transferred that shape to plastic and taped it in place:

With the plastic cut, I checked it for fit using the rib as the terminus:

I started by using duct tape (upon which modern civilization is built) as my guide and used a panel-scribe to start laying out where I need to cut:

I neglected to take photos of the first removal but the coffee finally kicked in, neurotransmitters started conducting a current, and I remembered to take photos of the second removal which shows how I did the first removal. I started with many passes using a panel scribe and once I had broken through the plastic, used the small #11 saw to finish the job (note the proximity of the knurled collar of the knife to the belly of the wings, which I didn’t notice during the first cutting…and that oversight created more work for me, as I’ll show you shortly):

I left the molded-on landing gear attachment on both sides for structural strength when it comes time to add the landing gear legs:

Once I had cut away both of the molded-in wells, I had access to the width of the gear wells and made a template for the main wing spar and transferred that to .020″ (.508mm) sheet styrene:

That got taped into position and much sanding ensued to fit it:

With the spar laid out, it was time to fit it into the wings, which started by shaving down the lip on the inside surface of the upper wing sections that have to encapsulate the spar:

With the main spar (mostly) fabricated, I checked fit. Yeah…that’s what it’s supposed to look like:

I used the molded ribs as templates for the ribs I’ll fabricate to replace them. The kit’s ribs were sawed free of the boxed landing gear well and the rough (very rough, as it turned out) shape of the ribs was transferred to card stock to create rough (same caveat as above) templates:

Since I plan on molding and casting this assembly, I added another layer of plastic sheet to the wing spar for ease of pouring later on, and then I started fitting the front of the well. At this point dry-fitting was getting into the realm where even having four hands would have been challenging so I tacked the spar/ribs in place with glue and started adding the front of the wells:

Once I had things about where I wanted them, I added a sheet of .020″ (.508mm) to close the top of the box and then pried the “tacked on” sections off (it was…challenging), only breaking a small piece off the front area which I glued back into place:

I added more sheet to the front of the wells, also to facilitate pouring resin later on:

I placed the landing gear wells onto the wing to lay out where the ribs need to go.

You’ll note how chewed up the underside center of the wing is. This is what can happen when one (me, particularly) focuses on one area being worked without paying attention to adjacent areas that could be (and in this case was) affected by the tool. That area got chewed up because I was so focused on the area I was sawing away that I failed to notice that the knurled handle of the Exacto knife saw was rubbing on the wing. So that’s going to need fixing:

An easy way to transfer measurements from one side to the other is by using a compass. I used the pivot point to follow the center line to get the spacing correct (or at least consistent) for the ribs:

From what I can tell, each wing of the Mustang was built separately and then bolted together at the center, leaving a partition between the two wings. I added that:

I used 005 styrene strip for the stringers:

The center partition has a prominent hole in it so I drilled one. However, when I make a mold of this assembly, that hole will keep the part (and the master, too) trapped in the silicone. An easy fix was a “plate” covering the hole of .005″ (.127mm), something easy to sand off once this is replicated in resin:

I debated notching the ribs to fit over the stringers and then realized it’s a LOT less work to notch the stringers:

I cut the ribs out of .015″ (.381mm) (still too thick, scale-wise, but more realistic in terms of getting that space to fill with resin later) and checked how it works…which it does:

The stringers on the Mustang have ridges and I replicated them using lead wool:

With the rib form finalized, I used .005″ (.127mm) to add the lip (after sticking the rib to double-sided tape for ease of working). Once the glue had cured, I sanded the lip down:

Then all the ribs had to be fit and that’s when I discovered how rough the templates were. There were many mistakes made during the fitting of the ribs including holes drilled in incorrect locations (and sizes) which had to be plugged and re-drilled, thin sections of the styrene breaking under handling which had to be reattached, but after much invective (both colorful and anatomically impossible), I finally had them finished (and hopefully correct):

They were then glued to a sheet of .040″ (1.016mm) styrene for ease of molding and casting:

The next step was to build (what I think are) the hydraulic cylinders that operate the landing gear (As an indication as to how small these things are, the squares of the cutting pad underneath it are half inch squares). Once I had those done, they got added to scrap styrene to create the pouring blocks for molding and casting:

Tiny details consume large blocks of time…

And speaking of consumption of time, I added the various details to the wells that I could. The hydraulic lines, wiring, and cables that run through this area can’t be added now because they’re free-standing from the surface. If I add them now they will be captured by the molding rubber, not that I think I could cast those sections in resin anyway because of their small diameter:

There are a few things to keep in mind when you’re using aftermarket detail sets…

The first is to check to see which model kit the particular set you’re interested in was built for. Sure, you can adapt a detail set to a different kit (if I can do it, so can you), and it will probably save you time over scratch-building the details. But you’ll probably (probably, not definitely) get a better fit if you’re working the kit that the person who did the masters worked from.

Second… Keep in mind that the person that did the masters the molds were taken from most likely did NOT use CAD/CAM to build the master(s) (though I’m sure it’s just a matter of time before 3D printers start being employed). There’s a talented person somewhere who scratch-built the masters using the kit (that I’m hoping you’re using) for dimensions and shape. Talent, as you’ve probably suspected by now, is a massive variable; some have more than others do. As a result, the degree of accurate fit to the resin parts is also going to be variable. Some sets are really works of art, others your 12 year old nephew could do better. Unfortunately until you have the set on hand, you can’t tell how good it’s going to be. Certain aftermarket suppliers have better (and deserved) reputations than others and as you go along you’ll develop your own internal database as to whose parts are worth the cost of acquisition and whose are not.

Third… CHECK YOUR REFERENCES. Check them frequently. Sometimes people get things wrong (yeah, ain’t that news…) and that includes the person who did the masters. In my limited experience, there’s a WIDE range of accuracy problems.

If you expect to buy an aftermarket set that will just drop into your model, you’re going to be very disappointed. There will be a lot of fitting and adapting to do. And don’t expect that the aftermarket set will include all the details you want. Aftermarket sets will save you tons of time scratch-building but my experience has been that they’re not complete and require me to add things…and sometimes remove things…from them to get what I’m after.

Resin parts are unaffected by styrene cement for reasons I hope are obvious…THEY AREN’T STYRENE, they’re resin. Depending on how “fine” the join is, you’ll need either epoxy or cynoacrylate glue – superglue – to do those tiny joins. The problem is that the tip of the superglue tube is NOT small enough and if you try to use it straight from the tube you’ll end up with a massive blob of glue that eradicates details. My method is to make a small puddle of glue on a piece of aluminum foil. Then I will dip something small into that puddle to transfer the glue to the area of the part(s) I want to marry.

There’s a few ways I can do that. If it’s a SMALL part (like freakin’ tiny brackets mounted to the side of a tank’s turret that rucksacks and gear hang off of), I’ll use the tip of a needle or a straight pin to transfer the glue. I have fingers that are much larger than I want them to be sometimes so instead of wrestling with just the pin or needle, I’ve mounted them onto convenient-to-hold things like a wine cork (for the needle) or an old chopstick (for the pin). When I have two parts that have to be touching before being glued, Micro-Mark sells a handy glue applicator (it’s in the middle of the photo):

Okay, that applicator is nice. But once I was looking at it, it reminded me of something and it didn’t take me long to figure out what. It reminded me of the head of a needle that had had the tip of ground off. I checked Micro-Mark’s applicator against a needle and damned if I wasn’t correct. So. If you want a similar applicator (and having one like this is VERY SODDING NICE), make your own applicator. Grind the head of a needle off until you have an open-ended fork and then mount the needle into the handy…well…handle of your choice. And by making your own applicator(s), you can tailor the size of the applicator to the size of the job, only being limited by how small a needle you can get.

So these aftermarket sets will save you a lot of time. They will rarely just drop in and expect to add things that you’re going to want included.

P51 Mustang! What a fighter. Just the name brings to mind George Preddy, Don Gentile, Bud Anderson, and John Landers…to name only a very few. But as it seems to be with many legends, the facts as they were are not the story that they became…

It all started with the Brits (as so much has). In 1940 they were having a rough go of things (which would get much worse shortly when France fell and they lost a LOT of equipment left behind at Dunkirk). They needed fighter aircraft desperately and in more numbers than they could produce. They approached the Curtiss corporation to see if they could get their hands on some P-40s, but Curtiss didn’t have the production capability to meet their contractual demands and the British demands. The Brits contacted North American Aviation (NAA) with the idea that NAA could build the P-40 under license from Curtiss. NAA had a counter-proposal. NAA wasn’t at all interested in producing a Curtiss product and suggested to the Brits that they could design a better fighter using the same engine that the P-40 was using (the Allison V12 liquid cooled V-1710). Legend has it that they promised the first prototype in 120 days and, though it’s a nice legend, it’s just a legend and that was never promised. Facts, as they often are, are more interesting…

I’m sure you’ve all heard of Eisenhower, Patton, and so on. Have you ever heard of 1st Lt. Benjamin Kelsey? Kelsey was an aeronautical engineer trained at M.I.T. and worked at Wright Patterson as the America’s chief fighter projects officer. To quote from P-51 Mustang in Detail and Scale, Volume 50 by Bert Kinsey (published by Squadron/Signal Publications):

On 4 May, 1940, when North American obtained release to sell the NA-73 [NAA’s internal designation for the new design] to the British [the British variant had different armament and exhaust tips and was called NAA-83], Kelsey had included the stipulation that two aircraft from the first production batch would be turned over to Wright Field for testing. This meant that the British would buy the U.S. Army two aircraft which it did not then have the funds to purchase for itself.

Kelsey was also aware of studies done on a new wing design, “laminar flow,” which decreased drag substantially by moving the thickest portion of the wing from the front where conventional design had placed it more towards the rear. Curtiss had also been ordered to turn over design studies that included a new design for a belly scoop for the radiator, also moving it back from the nose, where it produced drag, more rearwards towards the middle of the aircraft. (How much of Curtiss’ design studies were used seems to be up for debate and varies by who is asked.)

102 days after the contract was signed, NA-73 was rolled out, complete except for engine. When the 1120 hp V12 showed up a couple of weeks later, engine and taxi tests started. The first of what would be called the P-51 Mustang (named by the Brits, BTW) took to the air on October 26, 1940.

Another part of the Mustang legend revolves around that Allison engine. Legend has it that the Brits really liked the Mustang’s low and mid altitude performance but the engine ran out of beans at about 15,000 feet. The Allison engine had a single-stage supercharger and didn’t produce its rated 1120 hp above 15,000 feet, so somebody decided to put the Merlin V12, with a two-stage supercharger that the Spitfire used, in a P51…and the legend was born.

Not quite. Well, not at all. The Brits wanted the P-40 which was known to be a low and mid altitude fighter. Engineers, the most clever of clever monkeys, also knew that any air-frame that used an engine with a single-stage supercharger would be a low to mid altitude aircraft. The fact that two air-frames of the original production batch of the P-51, ordered even before the first flight of an XP-51 (which is what the Army called NA-73), had been set aside to be fitted with the Merlin engine (being built under license by Packard) showed that engineers were well aware of the Allison’s performance capabilities and were going to “fix” that by using an engine with a two-stage supercharger.

Something else not widely known was that at 10-12,000 feet, Mustangs with the Allison engine were faster than Mustangs with the Packard/Merlin engine.

Once the Packard/Merlin engine was installed, the Mustang was given the nomenclature P-51B. The radiator scoop was redesigned, making it simpler to build and operate as well as improving cooling (and the design of the scoop actually used the escaping hot air, heated by cooling the radiator, as additional thrust, which overcame any drag the newer scoop created), the carburetor intake was moved from above the engine to below it, and the three blade Curtiss Electric prop was replaced by a Hamilton Standard four blade cuffed prop.

As Kinsey states, both aircraft were very good at the altitudes they were designed to operate at.

One thing that pilots didn’t like about the early Mustangs was the canopy. The canopy opened in two places; the top was hinged at the right and opened to the right and the left side was hinged at the bottom and opened to the left, and when it was closed did not offer very much room. As if that wasn’t annoying enough, it wasn’t easy to see out of and bloody impossible to see rearward very well. B variants were fitted in the field with what’s been termed the “Malcolm” canopy. The Malcolm canopy, very similar to the canopy of the Spitfire, was a blown canopy of a single sheet of plexiglass (“perspex” as it was called in the ’40s) that did away with both sides and the top as well as all the framing for them, opening by sliding to the rear and making getting in and out of the cockpit much easier (a welcome feature to a pilot who had to get out in a hurry). Some of the B variants were fitted with it (there weren’t really a lot of the blown canopy to go around), but the real improvement in view came with the introduction of the bubble canopy. It had been tested (along with other improvements) on a late-production P-51B and introduced into production with the advent of the P-51D.

Shortly after the P-51B was deployed, it was given something else that turned the aircraft into a real game-changer. An 85 gallon fuel tank was installed in the fuselage behind the pilot.

An interesting thing about Mustangs and fuel…

THE definitive Mustang was the P-51D. With 184 gallons of fuel inside the wing’s fuel tanks, and 85 gallons of the fuselage tank, it could also carry up to 110 gallons in each drop tank. With a full fuel load of 489 gallons, I’ve read that the P-51D was 50% over maximum designed weight. (This may be part of The Legend, though…do your own research.) Carrying that much fuel did bad things to the carefully calculated center of gravity. When initiating roll maneuvers with a full load of fuel, it was nigh onto impossible to keep the Mustang from flipping over onto its back. I’ve read that recovery of stable flight was also nigh onto impossible. In practice, the fuselage tank was limited to 60 gallons, and even with less weight behind the pilot, roll maneuvers had to be initiated with a fair amount of forward stick to maintain control of where the aircraft went (and how it went there).

The first P-51, the Mustang Mk I, was built for the British and was armed with four .50 caliber (two of which were mounted in the “cheeks” of the engine cowling) and four .303 caliber machine guns. The first 51 for US use was armed with four 20mm Hispano Suiza cannons. The 51A and B used four Browning M2 .50 caliber machine guns, two in each wing, and the P-51D had six, three in each wing.

Three different types of belly scoops, two different designs of wings, three different styles of canopies… Oh. Did you know that there was a dive bombing version of the P-51? It was called the A-36…and it was armed with six .50 caliber machine guns (two in each wing, two in the nose in the same manner that British Mustang was) and had dive brakes above and below the wings.

Pretty legendary, huh?*

A36

Mustang MkI

P-51

P-51A (With a P-40 in background; modern photo)

P-51B

P-51B (Malcolm canopy; modern photo)

P-51D

*Another bit of the Mustang legend that’s not exactly as told…

The Legend has it that with the addition of the fuselage fuel tank to the P-51B, the US now had a fighter that could escort bombers all the way to and from their target. Well, the US already had a fighter that could do that with the P-38 Lightning (a project also initiated by 1st Lt. Ben Kelsey). So why wasn’t the P-38 used for bomber escort? General Ira Eaker didn’t believe the bombers needed fighter escort and that their defensive armament would be enough to protect them. And in spite of the high rate of bomber losses, Eaker didn’t change his mind (he sent the P-38s in England to North Africa). I wonder how much that decision affected his being relieved of command…

In order of production, this is how many Allison-engined Mustangs were built:

US designation XP-51; British designation Mustang I; 4 .50 cal. machine guns, 4 .303 machine guns; 620 built (2 taken by US for evaluation)

US designation P-51; British designation Mustang IA; 4 20mm cannons; 150 built (93 to British, 55 to USAAF, 2 for Merlin engine tests as XP-51B)

US designation A-36; no British designation; 6 .50 caliber machine guns; 500 built (one was shipped to England for evaluation, none were ordered)

US designation P-51A; British designation Mustang II; 4 .50 caliber machine guns; 310 (50 to England)

Degassing the silicone molding rubber worked great, so I thought it would be equally great degassing the casting resin. Well…no.

Degassing the mixed resin turned the compound into a froth that quickly overflowed the pour cup and made a mess inside the vacuum chamber; I was just lucky I’d put a paper plate down under the cup! I mixed another batch of resin in a larger cup and degassed it. More froth and it was quickly obvious that the larger pouring cup wasn’t large enough. Rather than let it overflow again, I played with the valve I use to release the vacuum, cracking it just enough to keep the froth inside the container…barely. The resin has a 20 minute pot life, so I degassed it for about 7 minutes, poured it into the molds, and degassed again for another 10 minutes, playing with the valve again to keep it from frothing entirely out of the molds.

24 hours later I demolded the parts and was quite taken aback with how many bubbles were in the castings; enough so that the castings got tossed.

Hmmm…back to the Internet and more research. That’s when I heard about pressure casting. Instead of degassing to get rid of bubbles, the resin-filled molds are exposed to pressure. A pressure pot is used for application of liquids, most often paint, using a spray gun. With some minor modifications, it can also be used to pressure cast resins.

Pressure pots can be expensive. Once again, Harbor Freight had something reasonably priced that looked like it would do the job; their item number is 66839 and purchase of it will get you one of these:

It’s a 2.5 gallon unit that’s rated for a maximum pressure of 60 psi.

Since I’m not going to be spraying anything, there were some parts to remove. The siphon tube inside the lid screws out easily and a 1/2″ NPT plug plugs the hole. I don’t need the pressure regulator that’s supplied. Instead I added a brass T-fitting threaded 1/4″ NPT. I added a 90 degree elbow to one end of the T, then a valve, and then a hose coupler to the valve. To the other end of the T I added the supplied pressure gauge. To keep things from leaking, all fittings were sealed using Teflon tape intended for that purpose:

Before I ran a casting through it, I wanted to test it first. I fired up my compressor and adjusted the regulator to 50 psi. With the valve on the pressure pot’s top closed, the hose got attached to the coupler. Per instructions (yes…I read them), I put the lid in place (I ended up adding alignment marks to the lid) and tightened the clamping screws hand tight and then slowly opened the valve. Nothing hissed or exploded but the safety valve let go at about 30 psi. I increased the pressure coming from the compressor’s regulator to 60 psi and adjusted the release valve on the pressure pot until it let go (that’s done by tightening the collar by the release ring if you need more pressure to make it pop, loosening it if you need less pressure). I closed the valve, removed the hose, and bled off the pressure coming from the compressor before readjusting the regulator back to 50 psi and hooked things back up and applied pressure. Once fully pressurized, I closed the valve, removed the hose, and brought the pot inside to see how many pounds of pressure it would lose over an hour’s time, which turned out to be about 14 psi/hour, so that meant when I used it to cast I would leave the pot connected to the compressor overnight making sure the compressor stayed turned on.

That’s what I did when I ran the first set of molds through the pressure casting process. (Put something flat on the bottom inside the pot because it’s dished and trying to get several molds to sit flat would be impossible without it.) I let the pot sit in the garage connected to the compressor overnight and under pressure. When I demolded the parts 99% of the bubbles were gone. Well, not gone but compressed so small that they can’t be seen…which is the intent of pressure casting.

Good enough!

One last thing I want to do is to add rolled up tarps. I looked at AM resin sets but that’s just what they look like…resin. I decided to try something I’d read about. Taking paper towels or tissues (without texture), cut them to size and fold and roll them, and then soak them in diluted white glue. Tie them as desired, drape over the vehicle as desired, then set them aside to dry. Once thoroughly dry, paint and install. I placed plastic wrap between the soggy tissues and the model and draped as desired:

It took a couple of days for them to dry completely, but once dried they were painted, pastels added, and then the rope was also put on that would have held things in place:

The pastels came out for dusting things up a bit and I added more fuel spills…and DONE:

Short on words, long on pictures, the only thing left to do now is to weather, stain, and dirty it up a bit and add some stowage:

Just a place marker in case you’ve been following this to let you know the build is on hold pending the arrival of new parts. I’ve been chasing my tail (an ugly sight at best) trying to mount the tracks. Links keep snapping. I drill both the track and the connectors out, set new styrene pins, and the next link breaks off. Okay…I see the pattern. Time out is called, new parts are on order, and I get to do all that fun stuff that cleaning 152 tracks and 304 connectors entails.

Experience. I just earned some.

A long-term project is interesting. When I start I don’t really think much about the end. That’s not to say that I don’t have a direction, intention, and goal, because I do. But I don’t think about its completion because with something long-term, if I spend too much time thinking about the finish I can overwhelm myself with all that needs to be done, and really…during the project, I’m not at the finish. I focus on whichever step towards completion I’m presently working on. I figure if I do that, the finish will mostly attend to itself.

And then one day I realize, sacred excrement! I’m almost FINISHED! That awareness always seems so sudden. Well…

I’M ALMOST FINISHED!

When using an airbrush, the force of the air coming out of the brush can blow small items off the bench. My way around that is to use double-sided tape to hold the piece in place, in this case it’s the loader’s hatch because I need to paint the pad on the underside of the hatch:

The blue masking tape works very well if I’m painting a room. IT ABSOLUTELY SUCKS FOR MODELING! To paint the rubber sections of the tracks (rubber black again), I had to mask off everything else. Well. There are about five hours invested in just getting the intercoursing tracks masked. No, I didn’t think it was particularly complex to mask because it shouldn’t be. However…the fornicating, sodomizing, tape refused to stick to anything other than what I did not want it to stick to. I spent hours pressing the tape back down. Hours. And even then, once I had the track paint mixed, again I had to press the tape back down. But I persevered and got them painted:

Below you will see two end connectors that I did not want the tape to stick to. This time the tape really stuck and when I gently pulled the tape off, I gently pulled the end connectors off, too. Not an insurmountable problem, but annoying anyway:

The underside of the hull, exhaust ducts, and areas where the sponsons meet the hull were painted flat black. Later I will mist Tamiya’s XF-62 Olive Drab over these areas:

Areas that I want to appear darker were then hit with Olive Drab:

I’ve discovered a fool-proof way to discover which small detail parts you still need to add. Paint the area where they need to go first. Shortly after you do, you’ll remember what you still need to add. In this case it was the commander’s gunsight (in front of his hatch opening) and the travel lock for the .50 caliber (1.27mm) (behind the roof vent). They’re easy to spot; they’re not painted:

Since I’m going to have to paint pretty much everything else with my custom mixed Olive Drab, I’ll hit those brass parts, too. Before I do that, I need to fill in the small bubbles that were left in the puttied co-driver’s hatch area that I didn’t see until I had it in primer:

With that taken care of, I misted the custom Olive Drab onto the bottom, the sponsons, and the back:

To keep from handling paint before it’s set, I mounted the small parts on the (INTERCOURSING) blue tape instead of the double-sided tape. I did the loader’s hatch with the double-sided tape because the Olive Drab has had months to cure and I wasn’t worried about leaving paint behind when I removed it. Such won’t be the case this time. And since the SODDING blue tape has (repeatedly) shown it doesn’t hold firmly, that will make getting the freshly painted parts off, reversed, and the other sides painted easier. Because I wasn’t going to be able to handle things, yet I would still need to move them so I could get complete paint coverage, I painted them on a turntable:

For all the difficulties and problems I encountered in this build, right now is the biggest problem. Leaving things alone until the paint cures! Because with a few minor exceptions (machine gun barrels, for example), the next step is to assemble all the parts:

Must.

Not.

Rush.

It seems I wasn’t quite as ready for prime time as I thought I was yesterday. Evidently,  my mind works (assuming that’s not an oxymoron) better earlier in the day than later. When I wrapped up last night, I really did think I was ready to throw paint first thing today…and then I sat down at the bench today. That’s when I saw all the things I wanted to prime, which is when I saw how few of those were ready to prime. Fine. Let’s get them ready! I mean really…how long could it take?

The answer to that question was about four hours.

But I wasn’t aware it was going to take that long, so the first thing I did was to prepare the radio antenna. No kit I’m aware of supplies one; they supply the antenna base and expect the builder to supply their own antenna. Okay, no problem. I’ll just stretch some sprue…uhm…how long a piece do I need?

My memory is a funny thing (mine is just hysterical). One of the bits it burped up was that in one of the Sherman kits, the length of the antenna is specified. There are four kits sitting on the shelves in the shop and of course it was the last one I looked in that had that information. 7cm.

Those of you who model know that the little tiny nose probes on a 1/48 scale aircraft are forever catching on things and breaking off. A 7cm antenna doesn’t exactly qualify as “tiny.” It didn’t require much imagination to realize that this aerial is probably going to break off frequently. What I needed was a way to dismount the antenna for those (RARE) times I’m going to transport this model.

I really like having a spare kit of my build. I went to the spare and cut the top off the spare antenna mount, drilled it out, and inserted a pin. Then I cut the bottom off the mount I’m going to use, drilled that out, and ended up with a two-piece antenna mount:

Stretching sprue requires patience. Sometimes I can get the diameter I want in one pull. Sometimes it seems like it takes forever (as defined as a half hour) to get what I want. This time I was right in two. I cut the sprue and measured 7cm, cut it again, and glued it to the top of the mount. Because the plastic I stretched was already Olive Drab, I didn’t paint it:

Now the antenna can be safely removed and put back on:

 At this point, I was still assuming that I’d be able to not only prime what I wanted to be primed, but also be able to use the airbrush to do some detail painting. I turned my attention to the .50 caliber (1.27mm) on the turret top.

I’d already thinned out a kit ammo box and laid in an ammo belt from my spares stash, now I needed to run another belt from the gun down and across the top of the belt already installed:

Handling small parts is rough on those parts. I spent considerable time reattaching things, more time waiting for the glue to cure, and then repeating that process several times (exacerbated by remembering I’d wanted to add the butterfly trigger to the .50 caliber (1.27mm), and wasn’t THAT an exercise that ate up time. Tempus fugit indeed.)

So after four hours of all of the above, I was finally ready to prime. I used a rattle can of Tamiya’s fine gray acrylic and hit everything that wasn’t styrene and much that is. Different materials and colors reflect light differently. Another reason to prime something that’s had parts added that the kit didn’t provide is to get one type of reflective surface. This way modifications, things that had to be made to fit, brass, lead, aluminum, resin, and styrene, will all reflect light the same way and will show you what doesn’t work, what needs more work, and the ego-stroke of seeing you got it right:

Now the primer will allow the subsequent paint layers some tooth. Tomorrow I’d like to get another detail or two added to the turret and then break out the airbrush to get some of the other details under paint, but that determination needs to wait for fresh brain and not be made with stale brain.

With most (I think) of the major sub-assemblies done, it’s time to start getting the hull ready for paint. Because of all the different materials used, I want to prime the upper hull before I lay down color; experience has shown me that acrylic paint doesn’t adhere well to brass.

I masked off the off the crew compartment and engine bay:

I had considered waiting until very late in the build to put the detail parts in place on the hull. But because of the fairly involved paint scheme I have in mind, getting the details to fit with the color scheme would be substantially easier if they were painted along with everything else on the hull. That means details get added now. The first thing I did was to shorten the front lifting loops and while the glue was setting up, I trimmed and blended where I had shortened the rear lifting loops. That took so long that the glue on the front loops had set up by the time I was finished with the rear and then did those also.

Then I started bending PE parts for head and taillight guards from Verlinden’s Sherman detail set and I used TMD’s resin guard for the siren:

Doing lenses of any hue with paint doesn’t work for me – it just screams I’M A MODEL. I wanted to try something different for the headlights. The New Tiger Models Direct (TMD) makes a set of headlights and guards. I had originally intended to use the clear resin headlights that came with the set but decided to get daring. I used the opaque resin parts instead because clear lens covers also come with the set. For a little more visual impact, I decided to leave the lens off one headlight completely (I mean it’s a tank and the lights are glass, so no great stretch for one of the headlights to be broken). For the other headlight I decided to try and make the reflector out of thick aluminum. I used the headlight itself as my buck and sharpened and shaped a bamboo chopstick to use as my form and very gently pressed the stick into the aluminum while it was in place over the headlight:

Using small scissors I cut away most of the excess:

After pressing and gluing the aluminum reflector into the headlight bucket, I did the fine trimming with a round-tip hobby knife then placed the lens over the reflector. I liked it, so I glued the lens in place and then used white glue to hold both headlights to see how they work. I liked that, too:

Moving to the back of the tank, I added the spare track links to the racks. Reference photos showed that the spare links were over-painted OD green (as was everything else on the tank when it got a coat of paint, including dirt, spare tracks, and whatever else was strapped to it), so I added them to the racks and then added the fold-down shelf:

I successfully glued one of the taillight protectors in place, but when I was doing the second one, evidently I had another brain fade. I thought I had the knife positioned properly but something shifted, I didn’t notice it had, and I ended up cutting a quarter of an inch off the protector instead of a profoundly thin piece as I’d intended to do.

[Insert colorful invective here]

Turn off the lights, walk away, get a good night’s sleep (for a change, surprisingly), and the next morning while having life’s blood coffee and just ruminating on my options, I remembered (for a change, surprisingly) that I have .005″ (.127mm) copper shim stock on hand. Okay, using the ruined guard as a basic template, I traced the shape onto the shim stock and using the small scissors again, cut out a new piece:

I liked the replacement so much better than the PE part that I snapped the “good” guard off and made another one:

Back at the front, I needed to add the front fender mounts where they attach to the differential cover. But something didn’t look right. I went to my reference photos and realized that Tamiya hadn’t molded the front fenders correctly. On most of the late-model M4A3s in the photos, the sheet metal doesn’t form a 90-degree angle with the line where the fender meets the differential casting (that seems to be more common on earlier variants), it runs vertically down from the corner of the fender. I added .020″ (.508mm) sheet:

I applied putty to hide the seam and let that sit to cure.

Tools don’t just sit there. Sherman tanks bounced a fair bit (saw a photo of one named, “Bouncing Bitch”), so anything not secured to the tank wouldn’t stay in place. What the kit has molded to the tools as “attachments” were unacceptable. The brass straps and buckles came from the Verlinden PE set, brackets and sockets were made from lead foil:

The engine covers are bolted closed and to open them they have to be unbolted. So where do the bolts go? I would imagine they’d just be set on top of the rear plates until it was time to close the covers. I modified four Grandt Line bolts, trimmed them to length, and glued them in place:

With the putty cured, I went back to the front and smoothed away the excess putty. Since I used .020″ (.508mm) sheet to add the missing fender sections, the edges needed to be thinned to replicate sheet metal (yeah, it’s still too thick for scale accuracy, but making them as thin as they should be would result in them being too thin for reality):

Okay, that looks much better:

Since the goal is to get this under a coat of primer, and all of the fiddling with the top surface is done (I HOPE), I replaced the resin weld beads that had gotten knocked off during handling (lots and lots of handling):

Another part I want to paint while I’m in painting-mode is the tracks. I have the buffed-out steel already on them as my undercoat. For it to be an “undercoat,” there needs to be a topcoat. For all the wear a tank in the field is subjected to, the tracks get the worst of it. I wanted something that combined generic crud with old rust, so that means I have to break one of my rules and mix paints from different manufacturers to get the color I’m after.

Heller’s Flat Rust is good if you’re after a reddish rust. But, like stupidity, rust comes in an almost infinite palette of colors. The first combined Tamiya’s XF-10 Flat Brown and XF-1 Flat Black, Polly-S Dirt (after twenty-four years it’s still good!), and Heller’s Flat Rust.

The second formula again used Tamiya’s XF-1 Flat Black and XF-10 Flat Brown and Polly-S Dirt, but this time I used Italeri’s Flat Rust which is browner than Heller’s version.

I don’t think the photo shows the colors well at all; I liked the second formula better than the first, so that’s what I’ll be using on the tracks for the topcoat.

The numbers or hash marks after the color indicates how many parts of which particular color are in the mix, so the first formula is one part each of brown, dirt, and black, and two parts flat rust. The second formula is one part each of dirt and brown, two parts flat rust, and five parts black:

Never one to miss a pun, it’s prime time!

Before I can permanently attach the upper hull to the lower, there’s just a few of things left to do; attach the .30 caliber, shoot the surfaces with clear matte, and then apply pastels to grunge it up a bit. First the .30 caliber:

Then clear matte and pastels:

And then the hull gets glued into place:

 Now I can redress Tamiya’s oversight regarding lack of sponson bottoms. Archer Dry Transfers has this template on their site:

However, its length is a bit off:

Unlike some things, adding a bit of length is easy:

When I assembled the tracks, I tried dry-fitting them to the spare kit and in addition to realizing that I was about two hands short of what I needed to easily add them, they were a tight fit. NTMD has a simple solution that I availed myself of. These mounts are eccentric (unlike your humble Narrator, who is merely “colorful”) and thereby can adjust where the rear idler wheel sits and allowing for easier (I HOPE) fit and tensioning of the tracks:

First the molded on mount gets removed:

Then a hole of the proper diameter to mount the eccentric is drilled:

And then adjustability is possible:

 I cut the sponson bottoms from 010 styrene and glued them into position. Yes, the template suggests 040. The reason I went with lighter stock was because due to the resin AM parts, the thin stock would be well supported.

I checked the fit of the exhaust deflectors and though not quite as precise a fit as I would hope for, it certainly falls within the 90-95% tolerance:

And perfectly hides the radiator ducting I’d made (oh well):

Okay, pay attention. This is a test. Aside from the fact that one part is resin and the other injection-molded styrene, what’s different between these two parts? (Hint: Look at the round depressions on either side of the engine access door, particularly to where the “D” shaped depressions are and are not.):

In case you didn’t see it, because I didn’t see it until I figured out why the exhaust tips did not fit, the depressions are reversed. Yes, the AM set got it wrong. When you look at this photo you will see the styrene I had to add (the white areas) to get the tips to (mostly) fit:

I inserted “mostly” next to “fit” because the tips are supposed to fit into the slots of the deflectors and this is the closest I can get them:

But given how hidden area is from casual view (because anybody picking this model up to look at it will have other things to concern themselves with, namely a “colorful” and irate builder), this is what I’m going to stay with: