Thanks Glenn. So far I'm very impressed with this kit and it's living up to its hype. I've been picking away at various assemblies and post where I'm at below.
First off, here's the cockpit tub assembly as it stood as of an hour ago. As in this case, I sometimes find myself caught up in the excitement of a build only to question whether or not I'm doing the right thing after I've gone ahead and done it. In this case, I followed the instructions as I interpreted them and, because I chose not to display the pilot figure (which is a bit of a shame because it's actually pretty good) I went with the E-style seat as instructed, not thinking that maybe the tub seat, which the instructions say to use with the pilot figure, was more appropriate. From what I've read, I guess technically the full seat is not wrong, since it's reported that some early model F's carried them, however it's more likely that the tub style would have been used.
At any rate, the seat has now been chopped off and relegated to the spares box as has the rear bulkhead. The rear bulkhead is now replaced with this jobbie:
..and the seat will be this guy. Note the cavernous ejector pin mark that is too large to be ignored.
We continue now with the starboard wall of the pit with all the nicely molded fiddly bits added. This is the start of the paint work here, with more details yet to be picked out. The only change I've made here was to cut out the solid plastic portion of the fuel line and replace it with a piece of clear sprue to more accurately reflect the sight glass in the real thing. I always get a kick out of thinking of these guys flying in combat with the fuel line squashed against their right shoulder.
The more sparse port side only gets a decent throttle. I'll need to add a few bits here.
Now the wheel well details are magnificent. Here, the walls and fairings for the struts have been added and painted with an initial splash of RLM 02. The openings outboard of the wheels come with beautifully molded ribs for the wings, which is a waste for me as these will be closed off. I've not installed all the ribbing here
For an added touch of realism, the kit comes with the hydraulic jacks for retracting the landing gear and these are glued to the inside of the upper wing halves. I neglected to add these and paint this area in 02 before realizing these parts were to be installed but I'll rectify this soon. Once the wings are assembled, you'll actually be able to see these jacks through the lightening holes in the strut fairings. What a neat touch!
Finally, I glued on the optional F-2 tail sections with the stiffening strips to the fuselage. The instrucitons would have you do this once the halves are together but, as with the Hasegawa P-40 with a similar detail, I chose to glue the piece to each half first to ensure a better fit.
As you can see, the fit is excellent and I'll just need to do some minor clean-up sanding here and rescribe of the panel line.
So that's where we stand at the moment. Thanks for watching!