This morning I plopped the resin cowl into place and after carefully lining it up as best as I could, I added a few spacers and secured it all with CA glue. Unfortunately, the fit was not perfect as the cowl that I used for the master was slightly wide.
In hindsight, I should have added the lower cowl piece to the master to suck in the sides before creating the mold. That way, it would have come out the right width. As it was, I had to thin the casting sacrificing some of the nice detail in the process. During the shaping process, it became apparent that the resin hadn't cured perfectly hard as there was still some springiness to it which made filing and sanding difficult. I took it to a point where I wanted to check how it looked and then applied a primer spray. Below is the result, revealing that there's some work to do yet. I hope the resin hardens some more.....
Also on the agenda was to take care of the rather poor fit where the booms meet the back of the wing. In order to make sure that the booms fit properly along the joints in the wings, it was necessary to sacrifice a nice fit at these locations which are easier to access for sanding and fitting.
After an initial rough filing, I coated the joint with Tamiya light curing putty and filed and sanded again
And after coating with primer to check how it looks, the result is a lot better than I started with though there's more to do.
Having got bored with that, I turned my attention to the instrument panel. The one supplied with the kit is unacceptable, being far too deep in the nose and too shallow in contour so I made a panel backing with a piece of sheet styrene cut to size and glued it onto the panel provided, which brought the surface closer to the pilot seat. The kit only supplied a decal which I promptly discarded and replaced it with a spare P-40 decal.
The portions not covered by the decal were then filled in with a 0.5mm felt pen to create the appearance of a few more instruments and buttons. The result is a purely fictional instrument panel but one that looks pretty good to my eye. It's also virtually invisible deep under the glare hood and, with the canopy closed, will hardly be noticeable.
Thanks for looking in everyone.