Fuselage side walls
You can see in the above images that the fuselage side walls have been added with further panels to come later. There are some ejector pin marks that are reduced by sanding although you probably won’t see them later. They are painted as per the instructions and the colour guide for all parts in the kit instructions is very helpful and speeds up assembly. On this last point I have been surprised how quick the build is when you consider the actual contact time, mostly very enjoyable so far but I’m still left with that nagging feeling and question – just how much of all this nice modelling will eventually be visible? Again, we’ll see…
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Forward fuselage assembly
Already you need to decide what panels you’ll be leaving open and initially I thought that I would just close up the gun bay panels to preserve some of the graceful lines of this aircraft and I noticed that when attached, the gun cowl didn’t fit too well and the arrow in the photo shows where the slight gap needed to be filled. I used cyano for this as it allows the cowl panel line to be re-scribed later on. Some additional sanding is needed to make good the join the separate nose cone but it all looks good when finally prepared.