Νοrth American P-51C Mustang, Tamiya 1/48 scale

It was no less than 14 years ago when I first saw Jun Temma's excellent P-51 "BERLIN EXPRESS" model.

I was instantly mesmerized by this interesting looking plane and decided that I would also like to build it one day. Planes go in and out of my "to-do-list", but this one kept there and I finally started to build it a few years ago.

This is Tamiya's 1:48th scale P-51B model. I bought the kit along with an old Aires cockpit and wheel bay set, so apart from those I planned to build it with a minimal amount of detail.

By now we know that P-51 wings were originally filled, so I started with puttying the wing panel lines. I didn't want to do a perfect job there because it is also evident from period photos that the filler started to crack after a while and the panel lines got visible here and there.

The gun ports on the leading edges of the wings were not sharp enough for me, so I drilled them out completely and rebuilt this area from plastic tube and sprue bits milled to size.

I painted the cockpit and the gear bays Gunze interior green and after the fuselage halves were glued together I hid the seam line with a piece of aluminium foil at the back of the cockpit top.

During construction, I found the rearview mirror too thick in the kit so decided to scratch build a new one. I knew it from my previous Tamiya builds that the propeller, spinner, flaps, wheels and the dog house are the weak points of the kit so I replaced them with PKTinyland aftermarket sets.

I used Alclad aluminium for the metal areas and Gunze acrylic olive drab for the base coat. For decals, I used the AeroMaster 48-288 - "Mustangs Forever, Part II" sheet.

I hesitated for a while whether to use the decals or paint on the checkers, but eventually went with the latter, so both those and the spinner colors match.

I only had one photo of the original plane and it showed perfect 15' invasion stripes on the fuselage. But the stripes on the wings didn't match for me. I long measured and thought about what could be with the wing stripes and eventually decided something similar that Jun deciphered from his sources.

I would like to thank Doug Burger for selling me his copy of the AeroMaster decal sheet and Jun Temma for his thoughts about "Berlin Express".