More work on the engine cowl:
Pic 1As stated above, I got rid of the cowl flaps in favour of using scratch built ones from plastic card. To do this, I had to thin the walls of the engine cowl where the flaps would attach. The edge on the left is as supplied in the kit, quite thick. The edge on the right has been ground thin using my Dremel tool.
Pics 2 and 3 show the finished plastic card cowl flaps installed. I'm fairly happy with the result.
Pic 4 The cowl flaps were controlled with small actuators that pierced the outer skin under the flaps. I drilled some holes and glued in some stretched sprue, seen here in 4 locations, one for each flap. These will be carefully trimmed to the correct length when the cowl is installed.
When contemplating whether or not to open the oil cooler cowl flaps on the underside, I discovered an error on the Eduard instruction sheet. Only some of the Hellcats had these flaps and the rig that I'm doing, in hindsight, does not have them according to the profile (page 1). The kit is provided with two styles of cowl, one with the flaps and one without and the intruction sheet tells me to use the ones with the flaps. Since I already glued on the front section and having cut off the kit flaps, I decided to continue and just fix this.
Pic 5 shows the kit-supplied cowl with the oil cooler flaps shown. In Pic 6, I've filled in the panel lines for the flaps and scribed the continuation of the panel line and added more rivets.
Next up will be painting the interior of the cowl and gluing it to the fuelage - tomorrow! Thanks for looking in.