Had a few hours break from a very rigorous schedule these days, so I rushed to finish this one up.
The propellers are kind of interesting;
This may be a common practice, but I haven't come across it before. The longer strip at the base gets rolled into the blade section and the shorter strip glues over it to hold it. The rolling creates a nice curve in the base of the prop. The second half of the prop is glued into place over the rolled base which forms the nice curve there. Not sure why this practice isn't more commonplace, it works nicely, IMHO.
I tried to make the canopy as sections of clear plastic glued together as it sounds like you did in your youth, Mike, but It wound up being easier to make a wood form and heating and forming plastic over it. I wound up with a piece that has some fogging in the top center. I'm sure I could have gotten a better one, but I had to decide whether to finish the canopy or the entire model today. I went with finishing the model;
Not quite sure this is the most accurate P-51 model around.
But it was fun!
Simple as it is, if I was a kid and got this together, I would have loved it!
Chris