Thanks everyone. Grant, those reference pics are excellent and thanks for the link. Sticking with the OOB philosophy though will prevernt me from adding more detail than there already is.
Terry thanks but I intend to take detail pics as I go along and some are shown below.
As for the weight suggestions, thanks Michael. There is no room in the wing leading edges in this small scale but I did make use of the external tank spaces as you'll see below.
Despite Wojtek's warnings, I did go ahead with my original idea of breaking into nose section via the forward bulkhead in the wheel well. Here's the before pic of the area in question:
The instructions call for 5 grams of weight in the nose so I got out a 6 gram lead sinker, smashed it flat, and cut it into little pieces.
The bulkhead was removed by drilling a large hole and cutting the rest open with a #11 X-Acto blade.
I was able to get about half of the pieces into the nose and then poured in some CA glue to hold it all in place. The rest of the pieces were added to the front of the wing tanks but since the tips of the tanks are between the front and main undercarriage, I wasn't sure this would be enough. I therefore cut another 2 gram chunk of lead and places it behind the pilot's seat with plenty of CA to hold it in place. Plenty of room there.
With that all done, I rebuilt the bulkhead using a shaped piece of plastic card as shown below.