And now for my update, titled "The good, the bad & the ugly"! I'll blame it on being distracted by the Olympics! (Apologies for the picture quality, left my tripod at work & hands are apparently not that steady!)
Leaving the door open on the other side so I can see all of the interior detail... so I figured I'd take my first crack at the "cut-them-yourself" masks on the other side. (That little stack on the left will all get cut out.) Knife blade wasn't quite sharp enough on the first few edges, had to replace blade & keep going. I'll use a little Micro mask to make sure I haven't missed any spots.
Cabin floor & rear set installed. Weathering looks a little off in the pictures but seems fine to my eye in person.
Cabin sidewalls. The piece in the lower left is the underside portion with all the stitching, more on that later...
OK, here comes the bad... Well , first the two halves were glued together. Hard to get all those little alignment pins into place - there are three in the dead space behind the rear bulkhead, one inside the cockpit that eventually supports the pilot's seat, and one which is also the mount for the IP. Doing it again, I think I would concentrate on making the topside seam perfect, then gouge out all the holes for the pins (from below so they wouldn't be seen) then add the pins & glue them. Fewer thing to worry about all at once.
Then Vance broke the rules & for some reason clipped off the little support piece that protects the slice that hangs over the door opening. I think I was planning on installing the wing spar & then got onto something else? Superglue at the break & then at the connection to the spar eventually fixes this.
YES! cabin floor + lower section placed inside
More of the cabin interior, looking backwards.
Now here comes some of the ugly. Hard to see in this pic, but look closely & you can see that despite all of the alignment pins etc., I have ended up with a step in that upper join, right side (in the pic) is slightly higher. A little filler putty & sanding required, not that big a deal I guess.
But as you may have noticed earlier, I also have a big gap between the sidewall pieces and the lower piece. There is triangular bracing near the cockpit that obviously needs to line up, so I superglued that section as best I could. The tail end of the lower portion slots into place at the rear too, but when both of those connections are made, the entire lower portion bulges leaving a noticeable gap.
Note the wing spar is in place now to avoid any more breakups on that long skinny bit!
Gap-filling superglue to the narrowest areas, epoxy putty to fill in the larger gaps. Kind of slopped on in a hurried, epoxy putty driven rage I guess! Sanding & smoothing tonight.
After I realized the lower portion wasn't fitting, I took it out &
examined all the interior framework etc that I installed. For the life
of me I can't figure out what I did to throw alignment off. (Have heard
nothing but glowing reviews of the kit, so I'm assuming I've done
something to it.) And now that I've stopped to think about it, maybe sanding the trailing edge of the lower portion would have fixed the issue without so much plastic surgery. Anyway, the patches I've made don't look to have any effect on alignment of the wing supports etc., so I should be alright from here on in!