Thanks very much gents. The more I look at the details of this kit, the more I'm disliking it for accuracy and it spurs my desire to fiddle with it to get it all correct. Nevertheless, I soldier on....
Let's start with where we left off yesterday. The nav lights were filed and wet sanded to the contour of the wing and received a brush coat of Future to make them sparkle. Pretty happy how they turned out.
The cockpit armour plate was painted and scuffed up and the shoulder belts were installed. This finished off the pit except for the gun sight.
The landing lights are now safely behind their lenses, which didn't fit too bad.
Now, onto the next peeve: the cannons. A couple of things wrong here. First, the goofy bands near the muzzle are incorrectly molded so these need to be modified. Worse, although the guns are given unique part numbers, they are nevertheless all the same but they should not be. The two outboard guns are supposed to be offset slightly from the inner ones and, coupled with the slight sweep on the wing leading edge, the outer guns should be much longer than the inners.
So, here are the modifications in progress. The first gun on the left is done, having had the band at the muzzle filed off and replaced with aluminum tape. The bore was also drilled out. The next one over is untouched. The third one has had a piece of plastic rod attached to the thick end which was then sawed in half and shaped with a file. The fourth one has just the rod glued on.
Another area that caught my eye was the grab handle, seen below as the trapezoidal outlined piece just aft of the cockpit. I plan to show the model with the foot step deployed and this means that the grab handle needs to be opened as both were linked on the real aircraft.
I drilled out the opening, cut around the edges to square it up, and installed a cover plate in the open position.
We now move on to the underside, where we are missing the signal lamp that should be present behind the radiator, as well as the opening for the foot step.
These have now been added:
Slowly getting there but these little things are taking a lot of time.