Merry Christmas (And A Mustang Update) - Part 1

First of all, Merry Christmas to all the readers of this blog, I hope your Christmas modelling endeavours are going well!

As promised the Mustang build has begun with Academy's 1:72 scale P-51B. Construction begun with the cockpit, which to fair to this kit is pretty decent straight out of the box. However as I was using an Eduard photo etch set, (SS250), to enhance it I had to file away a fair bit of it!

As you can imagine at this scale, things are small, but that was nothing compared to constructing the side walls. The Eduard set make a more 3D effect to the cockpit which looks much better, after some very fiddly bending and folding of parts which almost too small! Well worth the effort though.

So after waiting for all that glue to dry then it was onto putting the two halves together. Experience has taught me that Academy kits don't tend to go together well and this was the case again.It took a fair bit of filing, pushing and cursing to get them together with a small but fillable gap between them.

Once they were together the next stage was to attach the wings. The wings consist of a single bottom half with both wings and two top halves. The instructions say that you should build the whole assembly and then slot it onto the fuselage. Given the fit issues I'd experienced I decided to slot the single bottom half onto the fuselage with a bit of cutting and filing. Once that was in place I attached the two wing tops. As it happens that's exactly the way the Tamiya F-51D kit is meant to be built and I think it works much easier that way.

So all in all, a productive day. Only thing was that I was careless with the glazed parts, again! Fortunately the plastic box my breakfast croissant came in was a lifesaver as I was able to cut out a replacement window from it!