So here's the first pictures from this build. They're pretty basic, but that's as far as I've got at the moment.
Picture 1. All of the resin elements for the cockpit have been cut and given some paint. First, everything was given a coat of Halford's plastic primer to make sure the Tamiya acrylics took. Then I mixed some Tamiya XF 63 German Grey and XF 54 Dark Sea Grey in a ratio of 3:1, for a scale version of RLM 66 which was then airbrushed. The radar units have been removed from the top of the radio stack and the excess resin has been removed from the floor section, leaving the gun bay see-through. I'm still dry-fitting and testing, so nothing has been cemented yet, but it all seems to fit snugly.
Picture 2. Close ups of the cockpit walls. I sprayed some straight Tamiya XF 63 into the recesses to shade. Some darker greys still to be used for shadows, before I start the colouring and highlighting. As yet, none of the PE levers have been added.
Picture 3. Just thought I'd put this in for interest. It's the cross section of the cockpit floor. The red indicates the amount of resin plug that had to be removed from the bottom. As you can see, if you cut straight across, the gun bay would have been destroyed. As it is, to get this part to fit in the fuselage, it has to be thinned to about 1.5mm. So when it's done, there's very little strength left in the piece.
Picture 4. The work I did on the wings, showing the flaps and slats cut. The tricky bits were the angles on the bottom flaps and the thin bottom slats, which you can see, are just slivers of plastic. The trick now is to get them back together again!
That's it for the moment. I want to finish the cockpit then get the flaps and slats together then take it from there.
If anyone has references for the wheelwells and undercarriage, I'd be really grateful as I haven't managed to dig out anything myself for those parts.
Cheers, Gerry