Well team, I'm still kicking, though I took some more time off for sure. Wintertime is my modeling season, and last year I did a lot of ice fishing. This year due to COVID and some ultra-cold weather, the fishing gear stayed stowed and I was able to get back to the bench. Luckily, model aircraft don't hold grudges, and HC456 survived being moved around the workshop several times without any significant damage.
I was really close last time; only a few hours were required to bring this kit to completion. It went so fast I don't have any progress photos to share. Landing gear went on easily and squarely (thanks, Airfix) without a fuss. Have been having good luck with the Vallejo matte varnish, so I gave it a coat with good success. It doesn't get as dead-flat as I would really prefer, but it never looks snowy or dusty and is nice and hard.
Next the clear bits. Put the landing lights on (painted the inside recesses silver, then Future-coated), and decided that the Eduard PE landing light frames look way out of scale. I pulled them off with minimal (but some that I'm ignoring) paint damage. I was stymied for a while with what to do with the wingtip lights, which for some reason Airfix has decided to just mold into the wings instead of including clear parts. I ended up just painting them silver, drilling a small divot to dot with red/green, and then giving them a few flood coats of Future. They look okay. If I were more patient with this kit I'd have cut them out and custom-made some clear styrene lenses, but this kit is almost five years in the works. It's time to be done.
The canopy was the thing I feared the most: those vinyl masks had been stuck to the Future-coated plastic for a LONG TIME. I popped the canopy off the frame, and was glad to find the sticker masks peeled off without any fuss. They did leave behind some extra-sticky glue/gunk on the clear parts. After stewing about it overnight I dipped a pointy Q-tip in some low-odor mineral spirits and, thanks be to Odin, the sticky adhesive scrubbed right off and the clear finish was undamaged. I glued it into the open position and touched up the frame edges with Tamiya Cockpit Green. I sanded the frame off the wing-bottom light (from the first post) and fixed it into its hole with some PVA glue.
Next came chipping with the trusty Prismacolor silver pencil and a little artists' oils soot and streaking. After a couple nights for the oils to "dry" I ground up some pastels for dust around the undercarriage (the FAF often/usually operated from dirt/grass airfields).
Lastly came the final PE parts: the underwing pitot tube and the arial post. Careful use of CA glue and as steady a hand as I can muster got the job done. Then a strand of my wife's hair for the aerial wire.
And she's COMPLETE. I'm happy with the result -- I'm still seeing errors, especially in the photos (the wing leading edges! 
) but as I went to put it on the shelf I looked at my previous two 72nd birds and can definitely see some skill progression. I busted out the camera setup and got some quick shots to share.
I'm a little disappointed at how invisible the inside of the cockpit is even with the canopy open -- the seat and belts look great, but the gunsight and front dashboard (?) take up a lot of extra space and obscure the instruments and controls. The stick itself looks rather large for the scale -- with Eduard included a replacement for that in their PE set. But overall, for my first Airfix experience, I'm quite pleased. The plastic is a pleasure to work with, everything fit great (except the wing leading edge, but maybe that was me).