So, I borrowed my mothers camera (a Kodak CD40), and it turns out it's actually worse than my BlackBerry 8900 for close up photos, not surprising given that her camera only has 4MP and is about 10yrs old and wasn't all that expensive a model in the first place. I think I'll save up over the next couple of months and buy myself a Canon Powershot A810, that should be way better...
Anyway, I took some pics again to show the "final" build, it's final apart from a further gloss coat or coats on the lights to make them more shiny (they've had a number of coats already but I can't seem to get a shiny light look to them), a pair of XM-23 weapon systems to put an M60 on each side, and a minor bit of filling around the windscreen (read below for details on that).
All comments welcome, and I again apologise for the bad quality of the photos, I seem to be a bit hit and miss in the quality department, and I do the best I can with a BlackBerry smartphone.
As usual ignore the gap in the fuselage halves, that's there by design because I want to be able to separate the fuselage halves, although it's more of a gap than I'd like to see. I would try to fill it with Green Stuff by applying it to one side of the fuselage only and then hand sand/hand file/dremel it down to fit but it's a lot of work to do that now, especially as the gap is less in some areas than in others - I probably would have filled it if I'd have noticed the gap before painting the model.
And yes the windscreen is held on by magnets also, I tried gluing it in on one side only but for some reason when I put the fuselage halves together the window was recessed on the unglued side, doh!! I shall probably fill the gap there as that's easy to fill around the edge of the windscreen.
I also think I overdid the olive oil to fix the misty matt varnish issue I had on Saturday, some areas (on the top around those little curved shield shape vents on either side for example) seem to have a problem with a shine bleeding out from them, and the rocket pods seem a little shiny also, might have to attack those areas with some cotton buds or something.
I also wish I hadn't removed the antennae that were just behind the cockpit doors, or more to the point never put them on in the first place. They've left 3 holes as you can see and I don't think I can fix that without severely impacting on the surrounding paintwork, I've tried to fill the top hole on each side but even that's not gone too well. Hey, ho, we live and learn.
As previously mentioned the tail rotor broke off, the gear housing (I presume that's what it is), that little round piece on the top of the tail, broke off completely, here's how I fixed that (I also repainted the tail rotor blades as you can see, the yellow stripes are more even than they were when red/white/red) -
1 magnet on top of the tail, and a hole drilled into the gear assembly (or whatever it is) and a magnet pushed into it. The magnets are neodymium 2mm diameter by 1mm thick. And as you can see from the pics of the tail above it works perfectly, only downside is that that whole part can now rotate sideways around the tail - I may get around to putting a pin or something either side to stop that, if I can find something thin enough.
Thank you for reading this, it's a been a pleasure building the model despite the problems I've had with it and I've learnt some stuff along the way as well as getting back into the swing of painting models.
I'd especially like to thank Ray (rotorwash) for sending me the kit for basically nothing bar shipping costs and all the spare parts that came with it. Originally I was going to build the Revell Huey Hog kit and put miniguns on it, but I'm glad I didn't because the ESCI UH-1D is far superior to that kit and despite the problems I've had with it I think it's turned out great. The problems were my own fault due to clumsiness/lack of skill and due to the unique way in which I wanted to build the kit, i.e. putting magnets in to hold the fuselage together rather than gluing it and filling gaps as would any normal static model).
Again I can't thank you enough Ray.
Oh and also thanks to Joseph at Fireball modelworks for the fantastic decals (although I didn't use a lot of them that are on the sheet), I'm sure he's mortified that I had to cut the nose decals in half and made a bad job of it. 
Time to move on to other kits now though, I've got a 1/35 Bell 47 USCG to build, and other kits I've ordered when they arrive, a 1/35 UH-1C "Frog", and a 1/72 HH-3E+Sea King for detailing.