Thanks chaps. It was a quiet day yesterday and I did manage to make some significant progress. First off, an overall picture of the model showing how she looks at this stage:
The sliding canopy has been glued in place after masking the black area behind the head armour and painting the camo colours up to the seal strip. This area had, up til now, been covered by the hood in the closed position, which I used to keep overspray from going into the cockpit. The hood itself did not fit well and needed a fair amount of downward pressure and the use of CA glue to make it sit where it should. Note also that a bit of chipping has been started. For this I used a silver pencil.
The prop has been glued in place after weathering. It's not seen well here but the tips of the blades got a dose of silver sprayed from a distance to represent wear. I'm going to do a bit more work on some of these blades as I'm not yet satisfied with the look now that I am studying these closeups.
The beautiful Ultracast exhausts fit very well and are a welcome change from the boney kit ones. Note the black pastel faintly applied at the cowl panel lines to represent greasy fingers.
On the underside, we see the undercarriage in place as well as the inner gear doors and cooler flap. The grunge is quite evident and more than I might normally do but photos show this rig to be quite filthy. The cannon shell and link ejection chutes show quite a bit of black staining and the mud of Eindhoven was famous.
A close-up of one of the aftermarket Barracuda resin wheels shows the mud and dust effect that I wanted to achieve. The lead wire brake line can be made out as well.
The inner gear doors are also in place after receiving the salt weathering and a black wash on the inner depressions. The steel wear strip was made by simply running a graphite pencil over this area.
That's all for today but I should get a bit more done over the next day or two and will post up what should amount to the final pics during the next week. As always, thanks for following along and for the kind support.