Thanks for the feedback and comments gents. Geo - thanks for confirming my thoughts re: aircraft life, although I might just check to see if it was used elsewhere before assignment to 303 Sqn. I will use the linked website you shared - it has lots of useful information on Hurricanes!
I feel like I've done a tonne of work on the build, but when I look at it there seems to be hardly any progress at all. This is partly due to the seatbelt installation being twice as fiddly as needed because I missed installing it before mating wings to fuselage! Anywhooo - these first two shots show the final belt layout.
The belts themselves look just that little bit shiny and have lost their colour in a couple of small but noticeable locations. In the next couple of days I will coat the belts with some "dirty" matt clear once I've touched up the chipped areas. This is the second time I've used the paper belts and wanted to make a better fist of it than the first time. I initially painted them with oil paints, thinking this would soak nicely into the paper and give a really nice finish. Wrong!!! The oil paint would not dry - nothing I tried had any impact, which meant that every time you handled them the paint just rubbed off. I cleaned them back with white spirit and set about painting them again, this time with acrylic. Much better outcome, but it did mean the issue of brittleness when bending the belts to shape recurred like last time. The other thing I did was approached the attachment of the buckles much more carefully, being sure that they lined up (buckle front and back as well as to the belt itself). Painting the buckles was easier than I recall from last time, but I put some of that down to the better quality paint I used this time.
The other task I have been undertaking is making sure that all the parts and surfaces line up with no unsightly gaps or seams appear. The wing root fillet was one area that I was unhappy with, there was a small but very visible gap that I have now filled as seen in the first photo. The other side had a similar issue and was corrected in the same way.
Similarly with the horizontal stabilisers. Offering up the elevators revealed some huge gaps both laterally and fore/aft between the stabilisers and the elevators in the outboard section past the hinge point. If you zoom in on the pic you can see that the lateral gap was minimal, easily fixed with some 0.013 thickness styrene, but the gap fore/aft to the elevator was quite large (over 1mm or over 2" at full scale). I filled the gap with some much thicker card and smoothed and filled them into place. Hopefully you wont see the fix once some undercoat and final paint is applied.
I have done more work removing parts for undercarriage, radiator and propeller from the sprues, cleaning up all the seams and attachment gates in preparation for the next few steps in the assembly process. I will need to paint the radiator internals before its final assembly - one of the jobs I have in mind for tomorrow evening (assuming my workday goes to plan).
Not much else to note, so I will leave it there. As always, thanks to everyone for dropping by for a look.