Those files sound nice Vic.
Moving along, the front of the fuselage has been closed up along the top seam and work on the wing attachment is discussed and shown below. The latter is a heads up to Terry and Wildcat Andy who may see this as well.
The first pic here shows the front of the fuselage glued up. Plastic reinforcing patches have been applied over the seams for strengthening. If care is taken to make sure that things are straight and that interferences with the firewall are removed as mentioned earlier, things come togther reasonably well here.
The lower cowl will be left off until attachment of the two exhaust manifolds is completed on the inside. A trial fit shows that these fit nicely into the provided slot so there may not be a need for much of a support in the absence of the engine block. A trial fit of the lower cowl at this stage has shown that the fit will be very good. However, the kit-provided round end plate behind the prop is too big for the hole that I'm ending up with so it will need to be either replaced or filed down to fit properly.
Next we have some issues with the wing to fuselage joint. This rather odd and busy shot below is intended to point out the issues that need to be dealt with. First of all, the gap between the top halves of the wings that I ended up with was approximately 1mm narrower than the distance between the edges of the wing roots on the fuselage, enough that when the fuselage was trial fitted to the wings, the nicely replicated wing dihedral disappeared. I therefore removed the large, flat glue surfaces on the fuselage wing roots and filed away about 0.5mm of the wing root edges on each side so that the roots fit into the gap betwen the wing halves without forcing them.
Now that the fuselage fit more or less correctly, I found that there were a couple of interferences that prevented the wing roots from sitting down fully. These are noted by the circles in the above photo. First off, the lower edge of the engine firewall (top circle above, green circle in below pic) had to be trimmed as it hit the inner surface of the wing creating a step in the wing root. Next, the cockpit bulkheads seemed to interfere with the indentations for the rad covers, so these had to be notched (red circles in above and below pics). It was impossible to tell how much of a clash there was so I just cut the notches large. Finally, there was a third interference that prevented proper fit and that was a protrusion on the bottom of the seat frame that hit the molding in the wing for the signal lamp. The yellow circle in the pic below shows where this protrusion was cut off with my Dremel tool.
After all that fitting, I finally managed to get the wing roots to sit properly without there being a step at the edge of the upper wing halves. The next issue now was how to deal with the different lengths of the wing and fuselage chords as noted in my earlier post. The pic below shows the resultant mismatch with the the leading edges of the wings lined up at the front. This arrangement will result in the least work and the smoothest transition at the fairing.
To maintain this arrangement though, the cutout in the fuselage needs to be enlarged to receive the back of the wing assembly. As can be seen below, there's about a 1mm overlap that needs to be resolved by cutting the opening back a bit. This should be reasonably straight forward.
This is where I stand with progress at the moment. I anticipate that tomorrow will see the wings cemented on and hopefully the exhausts and the bottom engine cowl installed. More pics then.
Thanks for tuning in.