The Brassin resin wheels finally arrived this week so I was able to work on my punch list of fiddly bits. The first thing was to get the wheels prepped, painted, and installed. The wheels are beautifully cast and may yet turn out to be the nicest part of this model!
Eduard was nice enough to provide masks to allow painting of the tires first and the hubs last. The tires were shot with Tamiya Tire Black and the hubs were then done with gloss black.
The running surfaces were sprayed a light grey and the wheels were then given a wash of a muddy colour. The finishing touch was to paint on the red indicator tapes.
The finished tires were flattened with a file and glued to the model. Sorry for the stark lighting.
With the wheels no on, I proceeded to add the tiny bits that would have been lost in handling the model. Below can be seen the red gear-down indicator bar and the cable that retracts the tail wheel which has been attached to the landing gear retraction arm.
The antenna was added. For this I used nylon invisible mending thread. The spring on the antenna post was simulated by attaching a short length of stretched sprue. The intermediate wire is stretched sprue which is easier to cut and attach. After all this was set. I ran a dab of Alclad Steel along all the cables.
The last thing I need to check is whether or not I need to add a gun camera fairing on the leading edge (methinks yes but I need to verify) and then do a last once over of the model before declaring victory. Should be done with this one in the next couple of days ad I;ll post up the last few steps soon.