I would chime in with a lame April Fool's joke, but nah, I'll let that one go.
It was a good day for modeling. Pleasant weather here in SE Texas, so I spent the vast majority of my day at the bench. I feel like I knocked out a lot of this build but in truth there is still a long way to go.
I started by completing the engine nacelles and underside radiators.
Next came both the wheel bays. I started by sludging a Flory wash and cleaning up most of it. Then I put these parts together. These bays comprised 5 major pieces, not counting the small cylinders in the bays themselves. They were a bit fiddly, much like the nacelles, but with a little patience and some tape, I was able to get them together.
I then turned my attention to the bomb-bay. These are cages where the bombs are hoisted nose upward into. There is a hook at the nose of the bomb where, presumably, there is a catch inside the cage to hold the bomb from. That detail is not represented in the kit. The parts are fiddly as well, with not a whole lot in the way of solid attachment points for the inner partitioning walls, but like everything else in this kit, just a little patience goes a long way. Once everything was constructed I had to do some touch-up painting on the RLM 02 followed by some soot smudges from Tamiya weathering pastels.
Next up was to attach the engine nacelles to the wing. This kit features a lower wing section with the base of the nacelles and wheel wells. The outer wing sections are separate parts. To attach the nacelles, there was only a handful of small locating tabs. There were side-wall pieces that were a bear to fit into place, but once I determined how they were designed to fit, I was able to get them all into place looking reasonably accurate. I spent a lot of time online looking at other build photos of this part to verify I was approaching it correctly.
This is also where I ran into a head-scratching problem with a couple of kit parts. During some of my research of online build reviews, I noted more than once that people had trouble installing what could be firewalls into the nacelles (I say could be because it looks more like a simple bulkhead, not a firewall but is located where I would expect a firewall to exist). The build reviews indicated that if you followed Revell's directions, you would encounter issues fitting the nacelles correctly. I never could recreate that problem, but I ran into one of my own. These parts did not seem to fit anywhere near where they were supposed to go. It looked as if they were to snuggle into a narrow slot between the flat horizontal plate at the rear of the nacelle and the bottom of the radiator. They also did not appear to be parts that would ever be visible. So when I was unable to determine exactly how these parts were to be installed, I simply decided to not install them.
This also leads me to my only true gripe about this kit (everything else is more builder related). The instructions. I have noted more than one instance where the instructions indicate part numbers that do not exist. Or there are part numbers that are reversed from how they should actually be installed. Or they indicate that there will be a locator tab or something where there is not one. On a kit with this many parts the instructions should be of better quality.
Anyway, so here is my work on the nacelles.
On these two shots I was trying to get the radiator grill but all you can see is a black blob in there. I am shooting with an external flash but even that would not shoot any light into that part of the build.
Here are the wheel bays installed.
Here are the bomb-bay cages installed.
I had to build a bomb with the fins installed to verify that I could get the bombs into the cages after installing the cages. They are a tight fit but they do get into the cages through the bomb-bay slots. I really wasn't ready to fire up the airbrush today to paint all those bombs plus decal and weather them when I had a goal of getting the wing section attached to the fuselage today.
Wing attached and taped/clipped to dry.
Gotta check the dyhedral. It looks correct based on all the photos I have looked at.
While I don't relish being out of work, I do like that I have more time to spend at the bench and actually appear able to knock out this beast in a pretty quick time (which of late would be considered NOT par for the course for me).