So let's play with this Matryoshka Doll of an engine assembly. I hinted at the odd sequence earlier but here's how it goes:
Here are the culprits. The engine is nicely detailed and the instructions require one to add the complex exhaust header to the engine early in the game. You then slide the cowl flaps onto the nacelle and glue the 3 tabs. Then the engine assembly is glued to the firewall. The other pieces to finish the assembly are shown below.
Now the cowl proper is slid over the engine and is to be glued in place. I had made the mistake of doing just that before doing a dry fit of all the parts and had to tear it apart again. Fortunately, the glue hadn't fully hardened yet. Note the small alignment marks that I made. Despite there being a tab and slot in the parts to lock them in position, they are so small as to be ineffectual so the cowl easily rotated. I therefore had to add the marks to make sure that I had everything lined up properly. You see where this is going......
And of course, with everything else now in place, there is no way that the front cowl piece fits over the exhaust ring. There's a 2mm gap to overcome, far more than a gentle squeeze (or a big honking C-clamp for that matter) would close.
I see two options but only one will make this go away. The first one is to hollow out the front cowl but there's not enough meat on it to make up for the large gap. Which leads to the second and only viable option; cut 2mm out of each individual exhaust stack and reglue the ring in place. To ensure correct length, I will need to glue the ring into the front cowl first and then adjust the length of the stacks to their respective cylinders.
I don't know what happened here as Jeff didn't seem to have this problem when he built this kit in GB 25. Oh well, I dug the hole and now I need to get out. Stay tuned.
EDITTED Reference to Jeff's build Feb 11.