Got a bunch of things done on this build today starting with the cockpit which was completed as shown below.
The shoulder belts will go in later. The cockpit would have gone in easily from underneath had the resin stuff not gone in. As it turned out, I needed to cut the firewall and the front of the pit back all the way to the pedals to get it to fit in. After the pit was installed, I glued the lower wing half onto the model.
Next I decided to work on the spinner. One of the knocks against the Tamiya kit is that the spinner is much too small. Here's a pic of the Tamiya spinner next to an extra one that was included in my Eduard kit The Eduard one is for the D-11/13 which shares a tree with the D-9 kit and this one has the hole for the engine mounted cannon.
To plug the hole, a piece of tapered stretched sprue was glued in, sawn off and sanded smooth.
The Eduard spinner was also slightly larger in diameter and it did not come with an extra back plate so I had to make do with the Tamiya plate. To increase its diameter, I wound a piece of card around it, CA glued it in place, and filed it flush. The second pic shows the dry-fitted assembly.
Next it was on to the nose section. Although another criticism of the Tamiya kit is that the nose cowl is too cylindrical to accurately replicate the more bulbous real thing, I decided that this wasn't that big a deal and not worth waiting to get a replacement resin piece. I selected the piece with the open cowl flaps so one can peer inside to the back of the rad. The radiator was painted steel and given a wash of black oil paint on the front and back. On the inner piece, I installed the return hose which will be inserted into a hole drilled in the front of the fuselage.
In the following pic, you can see that I drilled out the MG131 barrels. The small bulge on the lower seam of the gun cowl is accurate for later built D-9's but photos of White 11 show these not to be present so the next step will be to remove these and create some smaller bulges further back and centrally on the cowl.
That's it for now. Thanks for looking in.