Cheers Wayne.
With the last round of weathering done and the fiddly bits stuck on, I'll say this is a wrap. Here are some brutal close-ups and descriptions of the last steps done. I'll post up some more walkarounds and the finished pics tomorrow.
After shooting on some exhaust stains, which I'll show further down, I added the radio mast and D/F loop. The latter is the kit support with the loop cut off and replaced with a bit of wine bottle foil. After I masked around the mast, I noticed that it was loose so I pulled it off and dabbed a small bit of CA on the end and put it back in place. As soon as I did that I saw some of the CA wick under the masking tape. "Oh Sh!t" said I quietly to myself but I went ahead and shot on the 75 rather than panic as nothing I could do would be done fast enough to stop the CA from setting up.
With some apprehension, I pulled off the masks and saw that it wasn't so bad. The pic below was before I was able to scrape off the CA with a toothpick. Probably the Future dip saved this from being much worse.
With that done, I went ahead with the antenna wire. Now, here I was debating whether to ignore historical accuracy and make the line taught or replicate the fact that, oddly, this aircraft had a very droopy line (see the pics at the start of the post). I elected to drape the line loosely, though it does look stupid, as I wanted to portray the aircraft as accurately as possible. To do this, I used some very thinly stretched sprue, cut a length with a natural curve in it, and glued both ends in place with CA. Insulators were added with thick primer and the separate, delicate vertical line was bent between finger and nail to a rough S shape and glued in place. The "wire" was then painted steel.
So here are the exhaust stains. These were done using, first, a very thin mix of dark brown sprayed close to the stacks and then moving the airbrush away from the model as I moved toward the rear of the model. Once the brown was done, I dumped the excess from my cup and added black paint and lots of thinner, not bothering to clean the brush. I then went over the same area in the same way as before making sure to not overpower the original brown. When that was done, I scratched the stains with the end of my tweezers to replicate where the ground crew would have scuffed the stains.
In these close-ups, you can just barely see that I also did some random taps and scratches with coloured pencils. In the 74 areas, I used a lighter green pencil and in the 77 zone I used a darker grey. It doesn't show up too well in these pics. I didn't do the 75 around the pit but will get at that tomorrow. You can also see that the I added some greasy dirt stains on the walkways.
The last item to be added was this resin pitot tube which I bought at Hannants when I visited there in 2015. I give this item a pretty low chance of survival as it's extremely delicate. If, or should I say when it breaks off, I'll replace it with brass tubing. Obviously you can see that I got lazy on the nav light lenses and simply painted them red and green. The fact is, I almost always forget to make the clear ones before I paint the model and by this time I don't want to ruin the paint.
The tail area got some mud splatters over a light spray of brown.
Here on the spinner and prop blades, you can see where I dabbed on some scuffs with the coloured pencils to break up the clean surfaces and to represent wear and tear.
And that's it for today. A I said, I'll take some more shots tomorrow to finish up and get on with something else. Thanks very much for following along and for your comments and support.