Finished model 2022-I

As mentioned long ago Pilot 13/1977 contains 3-plan drawings of the Cavalier Turbo Mustang III, and suggestions for how to build one, based on a P-51D Mustang kit. I thought this was a cool-looking aircraft that should be built at some point. Later, I decided I would build it in 1:160 scale for a train modeller friend of mine. When I found a 10 mm scale Minifigs white metal model of a P-51C Mustang, I thought maybe I could use it as the base for a conversion and started collecting references. A fellow modeller, whose name has been unfairly and unfortunately lost in time, mailed me his entire collection of magazine clippings on the Turbo Mustang III. I designed decals in 1:160 scale and had them printed by Al Superczynski. Then I spent several years angsting over how to do surgery on the metal model. I had studied the Heritage Aviation Models conversion kit and had some ideas, but it seemed a daunting prospect anyway, so in the end nothing happened, until I recently noticed that the Shapeways Marketplace contains a number of aircraft models of varying quality and wwitalik has a Turbo Mustang III model which is printable in 1:160. (The model claims to work as a Piper PA-48 Enforcer as well, which isn’t true—there are numerous differences between the two types, not the least being that the Enforcer’s engine exhaust is on the left side of the fuselage.)

I ordered the model printed in “White Natural Versatile Plastic” and it soon arrived. In order to be printable, several features of the model was grossly over-scale and I did my best to adjust these. The propeller blades and tailwheel were cut off, as they were mostly just plastic lumps. The main landing gear is also overly thick, but I felt uncertain about replacing that with anything sensible, but maybe I should have tried. The trailing edges of wings, stabilizer and fin had to be sanded down, which turned out to be difficult—the plastic is rather elastic and tended to just follow the sanding stick and then left grainy fibres along the edge. In the end I had to call it a day and consider the edges as thinned as I was likely to succeed with. In contrast, drilling out the exhaust was actually quite easy. Another things I left off was milling out the landing gear wells, as I wasn’t convinced I would be able to do it well—I would need some kind of way of carefully steering the cutter. Likewise, I briefly considered heatsmashing a transparent cockpit canopy, but apart from the technical difficulties of that, that would also have required milling out the cockpit without accidentally going through the sidewalls. There is a not-particularly expensive milling attachment for my Dremel, maybe I should invest in that.

I fashioned thin propeller blades out of Contrail profiles, cutting and carefully twisting them in warm (not too hot!) water to get blade shapes, landing gear covers were fashioned out of Plastruct sheet, tail wheel covers out of a slice of some aluminium can I had lying around, and a new tail wheel was made from a bit of Plastruct rod and piano wire. I primed the kit with Mr Surfacer 1200 and eventually started painting it. The Turbo Mustang III was intended as a COIN aircraft and at the time it would have meant deployment in Vietnam, so was painted in the then-current South-East Asia camouflage. This meant Humbrol 28, 116, 117, 118. I tried Maskol, again, to mask the colour fields and it seemed to work better now, but the Tamiya masking tape I used to mask off the bottom colour managed to lift a bit of the paint, and even some primer. With the uneven surface that the Mr Surfacer hadn’t managed to improve, airbrushing didn’t make much of a difference, and since I had to touch up scuffed paint at several points, I finally gave up and just brush painted the lot. The control surface hinge lines were accentuated with a pencil. (I need to get me a 0.3 mm pencil again, it has its uses.)

The result will not win any prices (I tried), but it felt good to finally get the old project out of my system, even if in a somewhat different form than originally envisioned.