The weather is absolute crap so a good day to spend a few hours at the bench. I started with some cockpit assembly and also some lower wing stuff.
The cockpit side panels had seen a shot of aluminum that was left over in my airbrush cup on a previous build. I added the air tanks, throttle, and other stuff yesterday and put the floor and seat parts together. The head armour is PE so will need a shot of primer before laying down the grey-green. Same goes for the seat armour, not seen. Oh and I drilled out the lightening holes on the frame as well.
Just to keep the glue flowing, I started on the lower wing half as well.
The wheel wells are made up of multiple parts to capture the retraction horn and the sloped walls.
The outer machine guns are provided as small stubs with hollowed muzzles and these are inserted into recesses on the moulding prior to gluing the upper wing half down. As you can see, I didn't bother with clean up of these parts, other than to make sure that the muzzles look clean.
Here are all my assembled bits together in my Chinese take-out storage system:
With that comes my first paint question. Since the wheel wells are to be painted in the "underside colour" per the instructions, do I assume that these were Azure Blue or did the crews that painted the Mediterranean colours on board the USS Wasp bother shooting the Sky Blue colour up into the wells? I'd be inclined to paint the wells Azure Blue with some Sky Blue overspray but thoughts/opinions/facts are welcome.