Hasegawa 1/32 N.A. P-51D "Cripes A' Mighty" IV SN 44-14906.

[Stikpusher]

Somebody said Heavy Metal...

[speedgraflex]

Cool! Edit: link fixed and working!!!

[Stikpusher]

Wow... that did not show up in preview...

[Stikpusher]

Try again....

[speedgraflex]

... must... try... again.... arghhhhh.....!



... and he succeeds!

[Stikpusher]

Apparently YouTube had a crash earlier.... must have been when it posted earlier...

[speedgraflex]

Whoa! Youtube crash! No worries. "Heavy Metal" is such a great magazine, and the film rocks almost as much as "Wizards" does. I am excited to at least have a direction to take with the finish. When I was reading about surface preparation, I knew that the Squadron Green fill from the previous owner would have to be channeled then filled with superglue. I ordered some fancy superglue to follow this idea... and some tiny dropper style applicator tubes... and some de-bonder, but basically I would need to create a shiny hardened surface instead of the pebbly porous one left from the Squadron Green putty. I also realized that I could buy a new aircraft kit for about 30 bucks so if I screw everything up with the foil I can retreat to the comfort of a new fuselage shell prepped by me to the best of my abilities and sally forth using the shiny black primer followed by Allclad approach which I still need to learn.



However, I like the fact that if I make the tinfoil work (with Microscale adhesive doing the bonding duties) I can then spray silver on the wing sections just like on the real aircraft, so there would be bare metal surfaces and painted surfaces together.

[kahunaminor]

I like where you thinking is heading.

Regards,

[speedgraflex]

Thanks so much for your responses, Carlos and Kent! Sincerely! You’re both aces. After a bit of a break or break up with this build over the base, the project moves again. Make no mistake, Kent, without a physical copy of the Tamiya base you provided, I was stuck trying to figure out thickness and balance issues. What struck me hardest was how efficiently light the Tamiya design is; something that initially I thought I would have to add would be weight, but this was not true at all!

Naoki Kobayashi, “Zoukei Mura SWS P-51D CONCEPT NOTE #4”



With natural metal finish, I am going to once again follow in the footsteps of the Zoukei Mura modeler who built a foil clad version of their kit. His work is outstanding and there is much here for me to learn about surface prep as well as scribing/punching rivets. Mainly I think the airecraft at this scale benefits by the approach.

Bob Bradford, “Applying a Natural Metal Finish Using Aluminum Foil,” October 17, 2014

I am also referencing a 2014 lecture which features foil cladding using Soviet aircraft specifically Albanian based MiG fighters as subject. What I admire about the approach vector of this modeler as well as the ZM fella is their insistence that the foil must be laid out in a sectional approach closely replicating the actual aircraft assembly.

More details will follow, including edits to this reply to include the names of these NMF modelers.

[Duke Maddog]

Wow, this is going to be real interesting to watch. Nice!