Welcome Eric, your in good company for building scale especially your first one. I think anyone with your wood building skills will have no problem carving some balsa.

I built the TF (Top Flight) 1/5 scale mustang as my second build and it will challenge any ones skills where war birds are concerned, the plane is a bit off scale, called a sport scale, and there has been many of them built over the years and there is many up grades available for it. I built mine using every thing in the kit needed to build the basic plane and even made the canopy a slider, it has a 84" one piece wing span, air retracts (Robart), engine is a DLE 55 cc engine, thought this might appeal to you seeing you like the mustang a lot.

Regardless what you choose I bet you can do a great job with it, Christmas isn't far off.

Here's mine, might heat you up for yours.

Leroy

Hi Leroy!

She is beautiful!

Well, I was for quite some time planning to go for the 60" version of the TF  P-51, but then I started to sniff into this side of the hobby and found out it has more to it.
Meaning it has tons of kits and plans available. And the Ziroligi plans and kits seems really nice, so I am kinda leaning that way ATM, but not sure at all..

We'll see

ATM I am leaning towards a P-47 with a captured German scheme. Linky - Linky 2
I guess that scheme is easier to do for an European than an American, and I have the fully respect for that.


Q: How is the  DLE 55 performing in this bird, and what is the total weigh?

Thank you, I always thought the mustang was the sexiest prop plane ever built, still is. It was the plane that helped win the air war over there, it might be because we could build them faster than they could shoot them down, it's quite a storied fighter of it's time.

The P-47 was a flying tank with a story of it's own, you could shoot the crap out of it and it just kept flying, as a model they fly beautifully almost like a low wing trainer, you can do a lot with that one, there are some great plans and kits out there that are more true scale than the TF kits.

The DLE 55 is a strong engine for the money and flies the mustang very scale like 85 HPH at 1/2 throttle, plane weighs an even 25 lbs., the polished finish is very slick and adds to speed if you like fast.  

Leroy