Thanks Hugh.
The fuselage has all the bits and pieces installed in each half now so it's ready to glue together. It's important to dry-fit and check everything because a) the instructions are a bit vague as to placement of some of the parts, b) there ARE interferences that need to be taken care of and c) alignment is crucial as things fit pretty tightly. Here, the cockpit is now in and the front wheel strut is installed. I don't like that the latter had to be done but reviews confirm there's no way to put it in later so I'll need to be careful.
At the rear, the lower turret support is now in after fussing with it a bit to make sure it's properly placed. Once I had it right, I blobbed some CA into the corners to secure it so it would not slip. It's important that the section between the gun barrel slots straddles the center seam dead center.
Despite my best efforts, I could not get the rear bulkhead of the bomb bay to meet the fuselage. Others have had this issue and have had to fill the gap, and I'll need to do that too.
I've now begun to glue the halves together. I like doing this a couple of inches at a time, gluing the seams with TET, squeezing them until the plastic melts to form a ridge, and clamping them before moving on to the next section. I've set the partially glued fuselage to dry over night and moved on to the exhaust stack challenge.
The first thing to do was to figure out the odd stack layout. The stack fingers are placed in groups of four or three and are not mirrored across the port and starboard nacelles. A careful look at references provided by Yves confirms that there are 9 sets of grouped stack fingers on each nacelle and that, looking forward from behind the nacelle, they are grouped 4/4/4/3/4/4/4/3/4 clockwise from the right corner. I eyeballed the spaces between the groups and estimated these gaps in terms of stack widths. Then, I had to get the length along the cowl where these stacks would go. To do this, I placed a piece of masking tape on the cowl and marked where the stack limits were against the hopefully accurate panel lines.
The tape was then removed and the length between the marks read on my vernier - 56.8mm.
I then drew up a sketch with the stack layout with the proper number of stacks and equivalent spaces.
34 stacks and 10 total spaces divided into the 56.8mm length gives me a 1.3mm width per stack so a group of 4 stacks is only 5.2 mm wide and the group of 3 is just 3.9mm wide. The Albion brass channels come in widths of 1.5 mm so they MIGHT work I have styrene rectangular rod .02 x .04" but that translates to 0.5 x 1mm. I'll need to see if I can find some evergreen rod that's .05" wide, which would be ideal but failing that, I may just make the individual stack groups by cutting them from card and scoring the seams. I think that hollowing the ends will be a non-starter.
Sorry for the lengthy description but I thought it might be of interest to anyone contemplating making these stacks. I'll now need to test the concept above by laying out bits of card to see if they'll fit and adjust as needed. Thanks for looking.