Thanks Geo, Dale and Charles
Okay, here's some more progress for you.
Pic 1
Engine in place. Looks a wee bit undersize, but I'm not throwing it back. It's probably a good thing.
Pic 2 3
The canopy is next. I gave the canopy a dip in Future and let dry and then added masks. I didn't like my efforts on this pic, so I replaced them, but did not take a pic.
I don;t know why...
pic 4- 8
The fun begins with the cowl. Heck! To start with I pieced it together, and there's nothing you can do about it, as it fits together with lugs that align everything. You can see here the gun troughs align as they should. Not so the upper cowl intake. I pondered that I just may hack it off and re-position it over a bit, somewhere more central. Looking closely at the problem I figured that in making the attempt it is probably going to go really badly as the intake is along a compound curve and relatively thin in places. As Bill would say, I sailed on. Not before adding the full scoop thing to the top of the cowl first as if you add it later as per instructions in won't line up easily. There's a tip Geo.
The cowl itself fits very badly on the fuselage, being very undersized on the inside diameter where they join up. You need to scrape out the inside and thin down the 'back end' behind the cowl flaps to achieve something that can be glued up. This is the half way point of scraping. Inside was painted 'anti corrosion green' as per cockpit and other interior parts as per de-structions.
Continuing the fun, those gun troughs just will not do. There's no guns for starters. And no holes for them either! There are a couple of reference pic in the manual that show the upper cowl guns either with blast tubes or without. The blast tubes are a rather large affair, and I could easily believe they were discarded in service. Since Red 5 when photographed had already had it's guns hacked out, thus I don't have a clear pic, I chose to exclude the blast tubes. There are no parts on the sprue that pass for blast tubes either. The holes were drilled out and muzzles fashioned out of brass tube. Handy stuff. 1.00mm outside diameter was used.
Pic 9
I also decided to add wing guns, and the reference suggests they poke out of the leading edge just a bit. I used .70mm for these. The kit just has holes in the leading edge, that you have to open out yourself.
Pic 10 and 11
The pitot was also replaced used brass tube and wire. You can see the plastic part is well oversized and badly formed in the molding process. I needed to plug up the hole in the wing leading edge and re-drill one in a smaller size.
Man, I thought I was just going to put this thing together. Okay, that's about it for today, thanks for looking in!
Cheers
Peter