Fujimi P-51D

The oldest kit in my stash:  an ancient Fujimi 1/48th scale P-51D Mustang.  It's pretty primitive by modern standards, and the alleged detailed Packard-Merlin engine is pretty laughable, but hey, it's progress.  Mustang aficionados will recognize the markings as Big Beautiful Doll, and will remark "Hey, isn't it supposed to have white and black checkerboards on the nose and wingtips?"  Yep.  But the decal sheet didn't offer them, and I didn't feel like masking and painting them myself.

I'm experimenting with a new phase in my modeling career called "Just build the damn thing already."  I know some people who suffer from terrible cases of Advanced Modeler Syndrome, where they can't start a kit until they have at least three different detail sets and twenty reference books.  I don't suffer from that syndrome, but I DO historically have problems deciding what to work on.  I don't know how many unbuilt kits are in my collection - too many, surely.  And sometimes I catch myself standing and looking at my collection and whining because I have "nothing I feel like building."  It's like the old Bruce Springsteen song "57 Channels and Nothing On" - I'm so spoiled for choice that I've become practically inert.

So the new phase:  whenever a kit slides off the pile and falls on the floor, I build it - whatever it happens to be.  Whether I feel like building it or not.  Whether I have detail parts for it or not.  Whether the decals are any good or not.  Whether I can find my airbrush or not.

So here it is.  It slid off the pile, and I built it.  It's brush-painted with Humbrol 56 (flat aluminum, I think) and a little Model Master olive drab.  It doesn't have the checkerboards.  It doesn't really pass muster.  And I didn't even bother with the pilot, who was misshapen to the point of resembling Zira in Planet of the Apes.  But at least it's done.

(I've had the kit for decades.  It's so old that the plastic bags containing the parts were breaking up into millions of tiny iridescent flakes.  I got the flakes all over myself, and when I saw myself glittering in the sun, I thought I was turning into a vampire.)