Here's some progress since Saturday. The entire upper surface of the model has been given a matte coat of Future dulled down with Tamiya Flat Base. I intentionally left a slight sheen on this as the reference pic does show some reflection on the upper wing.
Those exhaust stubs we talked about above are now glued in place:
Masks have been peeled off the canopy and the sliding frames installed. The fit of these clear parts is second to none.
I took a chance and glued on a stretched sprue antenna post - too early as I promptly broke it off again. Will wait til the last step now.
With the matte coat applied, I went and masked the areas for the wing walks and sprayed these Tamiya flat black lightened with a few drops of gray. I wanted these areas to be dead flat so did not use the kit-supplied decals for this and waited til after the the matte coat was applied so I could paint these on. The gas caps have been picked out in red darkened with a touch of black, still wet in the second pic below.
Meantime, the turret masking has started. I can only do so much of this before I need to put it down so am tackling this in stages.
I'm also thinking of weapons load out and have done a bit of reading to determine the likely configuration for this plane. It appears that the most common load out for anti-sub missions were rockets and Mark 54 depth bombs. Unfortunately, although the instructions show the depth bombs and rockets, I didn't get any in the box that Cory sent me so if I decide to add these, I'll need to scratch build the bombs and scrounge up some rockets from the spares box or from an unbuilt kit. The rockets are a bit of a question though. The first Avengers to use rockets had British Mk-4 70" rails installed. The picture below shows a Black 2 of VC-13 apparently launching off USS Guadalcanal on a mission against U-544 in January of 1944 (not sure if this is the same aircraft as in the flying pic of Black 2 which I'm depicting). The flying photo of my Black 2 was taken, according to a post I found elsewhere, on April 17, 1944, two days before a lone Avenger, flying from USS Tripoli and armed with depth bombs and rockets, attacked a U-Boat with rockets and depth bombs so I'd like to think that my Black 2 in the photo would have been rocket-equipped. Problem is that no Mk-4 rails are evident in the April 17 picture but it's also true that at some point, the British rockets were replaced with American designed Mk-5 "zero length" units which consisted of simple stubs that held the rockets without the drag-inducing rails. However, I don't know when this conversion took place so can not be sure if the flying picture of Black 2 is hiding Mk-5 rocket mounts under the wing.
If anyone can shed some light on this, I'd really appreciate it.