Much of the work that's been done since the last update has been filling, sanding, an scribing done over several stages. With the fuselage ready for a prime coat, I had to get the canopies in place and therefore complete some of the internal details as shown on the following pics.
The results of the filling work at the port wing root and rear fillet are shown here. The cockpit hatch is temporary to prevent paint going into the pit and is the piece that I had previously cut out. It's glued back in with carpenter's glue for ease of removal. Also seen is the hole I drilled at the wing leading edge for the fuel cooler.
Next up, despite what I said before, I did fabricate the longitudinal frame under the rear canopy. Unfortunately, as I suspected, it was a bit tall for the canopy so I had to remove part of it to install the glazing after this shot was taken.
The next two pics are of the gunsight that I modified from the kit part. The kit part is made from clear plastic and the reflector glass scales to about 2 inches thick. I therefore cut off the kit reflector glass and the lower piece of the molding to make the sight appear like the Mk I sight used in the Mk IX Spit. I replaced the reflector with a piece of clear plastic from some packaging and made the mounted from card and sprue - rather difficult to see in the next pic. The pic below shows the kit part (from my Mk VIII kit) and the finished modified piece next to it. The range dials were created by cutting a slot with my razor saw and, once the part was painted black, the numbers on the dials were simulated with white paint scratched with a needle. I'm kind of stoked how this turned out.
As stated earlier, I had bought an Ultracast resin prop when I got the resin seat pair so I set about assembling this today. I first washed the parts and unfortunately when drying them I broke the tip off one of the extremely thin blades. After luckily finding the broken tip on my kitchen counter, I carefully glued it back on with CA glue and sanded it smooth. You can just see the fracture line on the prop closest to the camera in this picture. I hope it doesn't break again because it's a major pain to glue this on. To make sure the prop blades were correcty aligned, I lined them up on the grid lines of my cutting mat and used a spacer gauge to ensure the blades were in plane. The pitch was adjusted by eye and each blade was glued in with CA individually.
The final pic shows the the last prop blade installed and curing as well as an overall shot of the model with the canopy parts having just been installed. I'll allow this to set over night and will then apply a primer coat tomorrow after masking the canopy.
Thanks for your continued interest.