F-51D & P-51D Dual Build WIP #1

Well, I needed a little break from the F40, so I dug out these two great kits from Airfix. I also have one of the Red Tails Mustangs to, but that is packed away in a box up in the loft still along with an old P-51B from Airfix. The RAF Mustang is one of the starter sets, but the paints are not being used, I do not think they are any good. So, both are the same kit, except the F-51 has an extra sprue included containing a different propeller, missiles and bombs. 

Construction has been done on both models at the same time, this also continued onto painting the interiors on them. Airfix have produced a nice kit with these Mustangs, the detail inside and out is clean and crisp. My only gripe with them has been that the control sticks and masts are very fragile, easily snap when cleaning them up. I have had to make a new control stick for one of them from wire with a blob of superglue on the end. The masts, well, tried to clean one up and SNAP! So I am leaving them other one on the sprue to use it as a pattern to make two out of plaststrut. 

The interior was sprayed with Mr Hobby's H58 interior green then brush painted the detail. Once all of the detail painting was completed, I went over the interior with some of Vallejo's Game Color black wash to tone things down. To finish off the interior, I added the decal containing the dials.

Assembling the fuselages were a dream, no issues aligning them up and minimal effort to cleaning the joints. It was the same with the main wings, remembering to drill the holes for the pylons and for the missile carriers on the F-51. After the first one was finished, assembling the second was even quicker. Well done Airfix, you have done yourselves proud with this tooling!

Onto painting now. As the F-51 is going to be in natural metal finish, I will be using Alclad for this job. First I sprayed the model with Alclad's gloss black base, then went over it with their honey primer. The P-51 will be painted using Xtracrylix paints, so I used the grey primer from Alclad on this model. I think these are some of the best model primers around to use.

The stage as it was last night. The F-51 had been painted. The whole model was sprayed with Alclad's airframe aluminium, before certain panels were picked out with duraluminium, dull aluminium and dark aluminium. To finish off, I sprayed the model with the gloss clear from Alclad to protect the finish. More progress on these two later.