Just Kidding: P-51B Part 8

Getting very close to the finish line now.

Glare in the photo above makes it look like the pilot is wearing a “bone dome.” Funny.

I added the black stripes to the underside of Hofer’s aircraft.

This was done with strips of black decal “trim film” and a little Tamiya gloss black on a brush. I added in the tail gear doors…not my best work.

I don’t think this would pass muster at Hyperscale. Ha ha! I mixed a little Model Master Acryl flat back into the Metal Color Aluminum to make a new shade: Mustang Stainless Steel.

I painted the canopy frames with the Metal Color. It works well for this kind of detail work as well as being supernaturally good at everything else. I regret not drilling out the exhausts, but that should have been done before I attached the wings. Oh well.

I read somewhere that the plexiglass “Malcolm hood” did not have frames fore and aft. This faint memory began to resurface more and more insistently as I carefully painted the frames that don’t exist.

Yeah.

I think Hofer’s Mustang came out fairly well. I learned a lot about a very, very interesting young man who died too young. I don’t think he really liked the nickname “Kid” but he made it his own. He seemed to prefer to spell “Kid” as “Kidd” (as in Captain Kidd?) and I wish I had a decal for the landing gear cover where he had his nickname (spelled “Kidd”).

I painted it “differently” than most versions of “Salem Representative” because I looked at the photos and this is what I saw. I’ve given up on relying on “what the majority agrees on.” Those tail stripes look red to me. The only question is: why didn’t Hofer put the red stripes on the wings???

We’ll never know.

The “whip antenna” was made from a sliver of bamboo. I drilled a small hole in the fuselage spine and applied some Testors “Clear Parts Cement” (name needs work) on the sliver and then pushed it in the hole. It’s leaned back because this is an “in flight” model and the relative wind would push the antenna back–I hope.

I use bamboo skewers as stirring sticks. If you live in a country where you don’t use bamboo skewers they are made by the billions for cooking kebabs. A thin sliver of bamboo makes a great pitot tube or antenna mast or whatever. Bamboo is much stronger and more flexible than stretched sprue and takes paint well. You just take a hobby knife and split the skewer to form a sliver. I’ve replaced a number of plastic antennae on models with bamboo slivers.

They also come in handy for dealing with hackers or spammers.

If you can read this feel free to post a comment. I installed a new plugin and I’m concerned that it killed my comments in some way. I’ll reward your faithful commenting by being more lenient than usual in my moderation. It’s quite an opportunity…