I landed on a half-assed fix for the bomb rack fairings. Though I do think they are deeper and wider than what the kit provides, I decided to just go ahead with making them a bit deeper and leaving the width alone as this would have involved a lot more work with little gain. Here are the kit parts:
Though I've not seen pictures to confirm it, I've deduced that the protrusions on the sides represent some sort of extension of the cannon shell ejection chute as the 250/500 lb rack was situated very close to the opening. My modification consists of snipping off these extensions and the locating pins and then simply gluing on a bit of card.
So with those set aside to dry. I tackled the tail planes. Once again, these are the larger Tempest type units that are provided as resin parts in the later "Sharkmouth" offering by Hasegawa. After shaping these to the fuselage and dry-fitting as best I could, I set up this jig to fit the parts. As these parts are quite loose and not a great fit, my plan was to place them with 5 minute epoxy and then, once set, run some CA into the joints.
Well, I learned something: 5 minute epoxy does not stick to the resin and styrene so I had to start over and go with straight CA. This proved to be tricky in that I had virtually no working time and so had to move fast. After a lot of fussing I got these things in and it's something I don't want to have to tackle again. The pictures below show the parts in place before blending the fairings in and don't really show how crappy a fit these parts are.
There's going to be a LOT of work to make these seams look presentable so that's how I'll be spending the next few days. Thanks for looking in.