Okay then, I decided I'd post progress here since it's drawn to a stand still right now owing to lack of paint. Here are some images to get things going. At first glance, there's lots of flash on the sprues and as I commented when I got this, the sprue thickness is a bit overdone in parts. Boy, I'm glad I'm not tackling the undercarriage. Sink marks, circular mould spots, surface blemishes, excess flash; this kit could have come from the 1950s or 60s.
As I mentioned elsewhere, the first thing I noticed was the nose shape; the 747 has a straight nose from the windscreen to the radome; as you can see here the kits' is not. I'm not sure at this stage whether I will actually alter this or not. I was hoping this would be a OOB assembly, but oh no...
Another glaring issue is with parts fit; for example, the holes for the hori stab don't line up with the part. I'll cut the pins off and make new ones with dowel. Also, the hori stab butts up to this bit of it that sticks out. Why didn't the kit manufacturer just butt it up against the fuselage? The hori stab, as on most big jet airliners is variable incidence and there is a flat plate here that's not represented, although I see some detail lines on the decal sheet that are vaguely meant to represent this.
I began with removing parts from the sprues and because of the excessive flash, each one has to be trimmed and sanded individually. The hori stab was glued first, which revealed big gaps in the leading and trailing edges and these were filled with putty and sanded - twice. The next bits were the engine exhaust cores, which were painted black (after the obligatory sanding and trimming of excess unwanted sticky-out bits).
More to come. This is not in real time as I'm much further down the line, so sit back and relax and enjoy the in-flight entertainment; a little Iron Maiden!