Ad: This forum contains affiliate links to products on Amazon and eBay. More information in Terms and rules
re: "Tamiya lacquer thinner" - save your money and buy yourself a gallon of generic lacquer thinner at Home Depot for 15 bucks. It's also great for cleaning dried paint off any surface including the metal parts of your air brush.
I think last year, my response would've been "Why not use them?" But having put some kits under my belt and using a few resin and photoetched upgrades from different manufacturers over the past year, I can understand the choice to avoid upgrades. At first blush, they seem have clear advantages over kit parts in many cases but the cost and the effort to actually utilize them often leaves you wondering, "was it worth it?" I bought a full upgrade set from Alley Cat for my 109G-10 build that went woefully underutilized due to the poor fit of many of bigger pieces including the prop spinner, the gun cowling and the upper wing panels. Resin, even though it is capable of superb detail, seems to be a rather inconsistent medium and quality varies from manufacturer to manufacturer or even batch to batch. The same thing applies to the photoetched stuff. It looks great on the fret but there are inherent drawbacks to PE, most notably the flatness of it. The sandwich composition of instrument panels help give IP's some 3D relief but most PE sets restrict that approach to the IP's only and not the sidewalls, radio units and other panels and often those looks a bit unrealistic due to the lack of depth. So yeah, I think I understand where you are coming from Karl. The good thing is that the Toryu is more than adequate without the CMK upgrades that I bought. Some of the kit parts are actually more detailed (i.e. parachute shelf) than the resin upgrades.Never buy upgrade kits John, even when they have come in the box a la Eduard i rarely use them !
John, masking tyre wear is just plain showing off i reckon !
Looks great