One Board Special - P51DMustang

For this years One Board Challenge I decided that I would make a model plane

There are lots of beautiful planes out there but one of my favourites is the P51D Mustang

Materials - A piece of 4x2 rescued from the skip at work

Tools - Bandsaw, drill, bench sander, table saw, dremel, elbow grease, paints and brushes

I started with my 4x2 which way way too wide so I ran it through the table saw and cut 2 10mm strips off.

one of these will become the wing and tail plane and the wider piece will be the plane body

I had downloaded an engineering drawing of a P51 from google and printed it on some A3, I cut out the wing shape and attached it to one of the narrower boards and trace around it.

I then cut the shape out on the bandsaw and sanded it to give the correct wing profile (very much by eye!)

Similar to above I made the tailplane

In a similar fashion I roughed out the fuselage from the thicker piece of wood, after cutting it out I found it was too "chunky" and needed thinning so I ran it through the bandsaw to just over finished size

It was then sanded and smoothed on the bench sander

I also tapered the rear and front down to the approximate correct dimensions of the real plane, again done by eye on the sander

I found that in order to attach the wing I was going to have to cut off the belly air scoop as making the space for the wing root would be near impossible otherwise, so off it came!

I then cut out the recess for the wing on the bandsaw and fitted the wing (after much adjusting with a dremel and sander

The wing was the glued into place and dowelled and the air scoop replaced (also dowelled)

I cut out a slot in the tail (again with a dremel) and then filed it out so that the tailplane would fit

All gaps were filled with a mixture of sawdust and wood glue and the sanded

I drew out a propeller shape on the thin offcut and then sanded the blades to give a prop profile, I then cut off the nose of the plane and attached the propeller and nose back on with a piece of dowel

I also cut a couple of exhaust manifolds from the thin piece and sanded them even thinner

The exhaust mounts were cut out using the dremel (again) and the manifolds glued into place

Here it is shown next to a laser cut Spitfire I am working on (Bought from MakeCNC)

I was in 2 minds whether to paint it but decided to so looked up some schemes on the web

I used some acrylic paints to paint it and the decals are spares/alternates from an airfix model