Thanks everyone. I very much appreciate the comments. Despite my silence on this thread for a while, I've been plugging away slowly toward the end of this build. Since the last update, I've completed all of the decals, including the myriad stencils, applied a wash to the panel lines, added some fiddley bits, and flat coated the model. Here are some shots of how it looks as of this evening.
The pitot tube was added. I made use of the kit part but snipped off the actual pitot and replaced it with a short length of brass rod. A panel wash has been applied and you can see some of the stenciling.
The crew access ladder was painted red and more stencils can be seen here. I just noticed that I failed to clean away the wash properly around the exit vent on the wing underside. And this after double checking and now that a flat coat has been applied, sealing the wash in. I'll need to go over this to fix it later as it looks wrong. Damned close-ups! Also, the little eyelets are now all gone and will need to be replaced. You can see where these were by the gaps in the panel line either side of the hatch.
The masks have been removed around the nav lights and things look good.
Here's a general shot of the underside showing the intended patchy paint work. More weathering will be done here to dirty up the area more with exhaust and cannon smoke stains, dirt, and liquid streaks.
The radio antenna mast and whip antenna have been added. The mast is the kit part with the base thinned down and the whip antenna is stretched sprue. The latter may be a bit on the thick side and I'll decide later if I will replace it. You can see also that I splattered more oil stains everywhere, now that the codes have been applied. The canopy masking has just been removed and some rudimentary cleaning has been done. More attention is still to come for the clear parts.
A stretched sprue IFF spike has also been added. Since the last update, I also resprayed the area representing the overpainted AEAF stripes on the fuselage upper half in a slightly darker colour than was applied before. This would have been newer paint on the real bird and not as faded as the original EDSG paint around this area. Not quite as clear is a dry-brush application where the original "EE-M" codes were overpainted on the remaining stripes
The starboard navigation lights on the upper side are seen here. The small rear-facing resin lights that I added before did not survive the handling and I'll need to put these back. The roundel on this side also has a tear that was repaired with paint near the outer edge at the 4 o'clock position. It can be barely seen so I'm pretty happy with the colour match I came up with.
A general shot of the upper surface is seen here. The oil spots show up quite well. The black cowl ring was painted in gloss on the real aircraft so I masked this area before applying the flat coat. There will also be more weathering done in this area before I'm done.
A general view from the back:
Here are the tail feathers. The red stencil is the dingy pull chord. The old IFF antenna attachment points remained after the wires were removed and these can just be seen on the leading edge of the horizontal stabs toward the ends of the straight sections.
More to come. Thanks for checking in.