I'm not going to lecture anyone on the history of the P-51, I think that saying that it was the most successful fighter of WWII about covers it.

I wanted to do a Dominican P-51D, but due to the lack of decals in the market and my unwillingness to paint the insignias I opted for a Tuskegee Airmen Mustang. This one is the “Duchess Arlene” flown by the 1^st Lt. Robert Williams of the 332^nd. The Tuskegee Airmen are famous for not losing any friendly bombers to enemy fire during their missions. They where not “Aces”, they never got as many kills as the rest of the squadrons, mainly because they only pursued enemies for a sort distance and returned to their escort duties.

It is not a bad kit. The fit is good overall. It does lack a lot of detail for a model that size, specially the cockpit and the engine, and I’m not sure if its only me but it seems like the seat and the engine are slightly undersized for the model. The seat is definitely inaccurate as well as the bubble canopy (it has a large bulge at the bottom). It comes with a set of decals that give you only one option.

 There are 2 resin figures in the kit, ugly as hell if you ask me, they should have invested that money in the kit, the control surfaces are movable, if you are into that sort of thing, and the landing gear has springs (I don’t recommend installing those). It does not come with any visible PE’s (just the ones used to install the control surfaces.

 I began by assembling the engine as per instructions, no big deal and no complications here. I scratch-built the sparkplug wires, fuel injector manifold, oil and hydraulic piping and drilled the frames that goes above the engine. After that I moved on to the cockpit. Major work involved in here. The gun sight is inaccurate it was re-done partially, the seatbelts were installed in the seat, the panel was assembled and everything as per instructions. All the placards where installed all well as the boxes and controls. All the switches were scratch-built as well as all levers, knobs and trim wheels.

 I Assembled the control Surfaces and painted them, Did all the remaining sub-assemblies, such as landing gear and tail wheel, gear well (extra piping was installed in here), drop-tanks, machineguns and machinegun bays and propeller.

 The kit halves where glued (dry-fit everything first, you might have to trim the tail wheel  so that the tail section glues properly. The lower section of the wings was glued. There is a major gap you are going to have to correct, where the fuselage meets the wings in the forward section. The top sections of the wings where installed (minor filling required), finally the horizontal stabilizers where glued. The rest of the sub-assemblies were installed after all major painting was completed.

 First thing is, and this might be obvious to experienced modelers but worth mentioning, DO NOT follow the painting instructions of the kit. I painted the engine gloss black and dry-brushed it with silver. All my Zinc Chromate greens are of different shades (because different manufacturers used different kinds and all parts where not made by the same manufacturer). For the interior painting, I first painted everything with aluminum paint (enamel), after it had dried for several days, I painted everything with Zinc Chromate green (enamel), after dried for several days again I painted over that with semi-gloss black (water-based) and after about and hour of drying I took a scribing tool and started “scratching’ my paint to reveal the Zinc Chromate and in some cases the aluminum.

 For the outside. I Used Alclad II for the job, I first painted the whole thing with Gloss Enamel Black (not eh Alclad black base, STAY AWAY FROM THAT STUFF, IT SUCKS!!!!) let this dry for at least 24 hours, if you can, wait more. Bare aluminum planes shine when they are new and well maintained, and they tend to dull as time passes, I chose to do something in between here. So here it is. I took my freshly gloss black painted model, and proceeded to pre-shade (sort of) all panel lines using flat white paint, by doing this I’m covering some of the gloss black paint that Alclad likes so when I spray Alclad over the flat white the result will be a flat or dull Alclad finish. I sprayed first the whole model with Alclad Chrome, and then Alclad polished Aluminum. Removed the dust residue, and proceeded to paint the Tail, wingtips and nose with red. For the red I used insignia red and added some yellow for the orange or more vivid look. For all the experts out there, the trim tabs are now painted black like they should be, I just forgot to paint them before taking the pictures for the review, as well as the Propeller Boots (they are not shinny anymore and have no silver on the leading edges), just to cover myself here, I know how picky we can be about accuracy (myself included). 

For the markings, I used the stencils that came with the kit along with the Red Tail Mustangs (Tuskegee Airmen) set by AM tech decals, which in my opinion are very nice in quality.

The kit is of nice quality, and relatively simple to assemble, I was pleased with the outcome considering it was my first Alclad painted model. I’m still going to pursue my Dominican P-51 using the same kit (unless someone comes out with a better one) but I will wait until some more after-markets come out for it, specially the canopy and engine. Regardless of all the minor inaccuracies it in my opinion the best 1/24 P-51 kit in the market at this point.  For questions or comments please write to Av8r1977@yahoo.com.

Hope you enjoyed it. Thanks for reading my review.

www.mustangsmustangs.com

P-51 Walkaround, Squadron Signal Publications

P-51 Mustang in Color, Squadron Signal Publications

Tamiya Model Magazine, Issue 99