Tamiya's 1/48 scale
P-51D Mustang

by Andy Brown

North American P-51D Mustang

Tamiya's 1/48 scale P-51D Mustang is available online from Squadron

F-51D Mustang - Corps d'Aviation d'Haiti 1963 - This is one of a series of Tamiya P-51D kits that I built after having been inspired by Dan Hagedorn’s marvellous book titled ‘Latin American Air Wars and Aircraft 1912-1969′. The book is beautifully illustrated and depicts a host of aircraft types in a plethora of interesting and exotic camouflage schemes; I can’t recommend it highly enough.

The Tamiya 1:48th P-51 series of kits are all a pleasure to build and to date I have completed 6 in various marks and liveries. By far the most enjoyable of the 6 were the 3 Latin American variants and in my view, this Haitian machine was the most interesting of the lot.

The model was built straight from the box and falls together with no need for filler, and if you’ve just finished a ‘challenging kit’, then I can recommend this model as the perfect antidote for your stress.

To modify the basic kit into the Haitian variant, I fabricated from plastic card and stretched sprue, the 3 antennae that are visible on the spine and under the tailfin.

The pylons which accommodate the F-86 drop-tanks were 'stolen' from a Hasegawa kit sitting in my over-large collection.

The model is sprayed with Vallejo Model Colour Silver Grey (No 152) and the red embellishments were done with Humbrol Bright Red (No 19). The final finish was produced by over-spraying the entire model with Hannants Xtracrylix Flat Varnish.

The decals were homemade, as they are relatively simple and I produced the images using MS Word’s drawing tools which I then printed onto inkjet printable decal paper using my quite primitive HP Deskjet printer and HP Ink cartridges (a must for decal printing as anything other than HP originals produces inferior results!).

Larger format images of the model can be viewed in the Subscribers' Gallery section of Geoff Coughlin's Scale Modelling Now Magazine.

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Model, Images and Text Copyright © 2012 by Andy Brown
Page Created 5 February, 2012
Last Updated 5 February, 2012

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