My-Stang! P-51D Mustang 1/32 Hasegawa-Dragon Kitbash

By Suresh Nathan

Introduction

There is a sense of trepidation when one (dares to) show a Mustang. Everyone has an idea of what it looks like and there are numerous documentaries and reference material about it. The last time I built one was more than 30 years ago and it’s taken me a while to get over the trauma of watching gobs of silver paint that would not dry weeks after hand-painting the 1/72 Hasegawa offering. Wanting to get it right I waited forever for the perfect Mustang kit- the Hasegawa offering with fine surface detail is actually quite nice apart from rudimentary to completely inaccurate cockpit and engine bay detail. The Dragon kit is beautiful on the inside but those pockmark rivets just get to me every time. Hence I decided to combine the two kits.

References

It would not be unfair to say this model was well referenced. References included:

P-51D Walkaround from Squadron/Signal Publications
Aircraft Anatomy from World War II from Chartwell Books Inc
Cockpit from Airlife
Allied Aircraft Piston Engines of World War II from SAE International
A few P-51Ds from the Planes of Fames Museum, Chino, California
The Mustang in the Smithsonian

The Models

The venerable Hasegawa kit holds its own against newer offerings except for engine bay, cockpit and wheel well detail. The Dragon kit is decent in the engine bay, cockpit and , with a little work, the machine gun bay. Hence I used the insides of the Dragon kit and the shell of the Hasegawa kit.

Sidewall details included ribbing and radio equipment. Ribbings were riveted using a Sensipress riveter. Radio equipment is accurate to references.

The Dragon instrument panel gives two options- a photo-etch panel which is kooky but easy and an acrylic glass panel to which the individual decal dials need to be stuck on. Why this was not produced as one piece I don’t know. I chose the latter and it was nice enough.

The Dragon engine and housing is very good. I rewired the engine and put in a few hydraulic hoses.

Strictly speaking the hoses shouldn’t extend the way they do here (Figure 6) but I did it this way so the engine could be removed without damaging too much. The air intake was vacuum formed over an epoxy putty/ copper sheet master and detailed with brass screen and plastic sheet.

A fair bit of trial fitting and trimming /augmenting was needed to get the Dragon parts to fit in the Hasegawa.

The results were quite pleasing and the engine fits snugly and can be removed.

Few kits on the market show the wheel wells on a P51-D accurately. In the back the wheel wells are recessed (Figure 10). Hence I had to cut the back of this panel and detail the braces and wiring. The obvious thing to do was to do this before the wing halves were mated but I didn’t. What can I say...

With the addition of hydraulics and a landing light (Dragon) you get a nice result.

The gun bay is heavily modified from the Dragon with extra wiring, braces and detailing.

To give the ammo belts a natural sit, sections of rod were placed under and the ammo belts heavily soaked with glue to allow them to sag. The information panel on the main panel was scanned from a magazine, edited and printed on photographic paper.

The 2 piece canopy just would not go together well. I tried repeatedly but the chrome finish is very unforgiving to fillers and seams (the picture doesn’t do this justice). Also, the thickness of the stock canopy prevents it from hugging the side wall realistically. I abandoned it after repeated tries (I counted 5) and vacuum-formed a new one which I like a lot more. The lettering on the canopy was done by hand.

The Pilot

I have a lot of these guys from many manufacturers. This one was from Reheat and from the day I bought it I knew it was destined for the P-51D.

Painting

I wanted to try something different with the interior. On previous planes I generally felt that the final result of ‘scale color’ is a dull finish. On the Mustang, the interior green borders close to being unrealistically green even on the real thing. I decide to preshade with red-brown and color with lime green. With washes, etc it comes out just about right.

With the trauma of my earlier Mustang looking over my shoulder I used Alclad chrome as the base color. This was shaded with steel, white aluminum and dark aluminum to give panel variation. Future floor wax sealed the model. I used an acrylic sludge wash to accent details and turpentine thinned oil for a pin wash. The decals were from both the Hasegawa and Dragon kit. Surprisingly the Hasegawa decals were very fragile and kept breaking apart. The Dragon decals were a bit too thick for my liking and where possible I tried the Hasegawa decals first.

The model portrays the mount of Lt Col John C Meyer, 352nd Fighter Group Commander (known as the "Blue-nosed Bastards of Bodney"). The lettering on the canopy as portrayed by Dragon is accurate for Petie 2. He had another Petie 3 that had more “Times” like lettering which is shown in the Hasegawa kit (a minor faux pas).

This was a thoroughly satisfying project and I hope the Mustang fans out there will like it.