Diorama 24-04: Some Where in Italy

Staying in Italy for another diorama, and this one has been in the idea vault for a very long time, over two years! Below is my reference photo, and I’m not a P-51 aficionado, so I just picked the AirFix kit that was on Hobby Lobby’s shelf, A01004. This kit has traveled all the way from Georgia when I bought it in May 2020. Back then I also found a company in China that was selling scale railroad tracks, so I picked up a 1/35 and 1/72 scale kit, so it was nice to finally add them to a diorama build.

Reference photo from a 2+ year old internet search, the original link did state that the crash plane was photographed somewhere in Central Italy.

I took this opportunity to push my model making skills to the limit, as I need to cut away lots of the kit and re-fashion it into a crash landed plane. Flaps and Elevators needed to be positioned down with the loss of hydraulic pressure. The props needed to be bent and some of the aluminum panels needed to be replace as crumbled sheets. Luckily, only one wheel can be seen, so I was able to grind away one wheel from the hub and drill out the hub from the other.

So not a perfect match, should have used the reference photo for a better paint match and base build, but here the final build

And I side-by-side look: