Made some progress today, though mostly a day of fiddling to get around the shortcomings of Fujimi's engineering...
After painting the inside of the nose yesterday, I got the cockpit walls done, and added the recon camera lateral windows. They seat from behind and the clear plastic had large dimples... Nothing to be done about the latter and the fomer had me imagining the windows falling out into the interior during masking. I had attached them with Clear Parts Cement, which is never super strong, so I scraped away some paint and superglued in some styrene stock to support the windows. They seem to be stronger now...
The seats got their metallic paint buckles and were added to the cockpit along with the sticks. However I noticed at once that the tub seemed to be warped, with a big depression at the back that meant the GIB would have been without any lateral vision at all, his helmet would not have cleared the sil. I know the rear cockpit was very tight, but that couldn't be right, so I installed a 6mm styrene prop under the back of the cockpit to flex it upward so that he had at least an eyeline over the sils:
I made a call on the intakes: these trunks are XF-24 corresponding to RAL 7012, topside camo gray:
As you can see, the fuselage halves were just the tiniest bit warped... I glued them from the tail forward, applying liquid cement from the inside and anchoring them with tape:
The interior was braced with plastic strip. Also, with the fuselage together a few fit issues began to appear, such as the fact the fuselage was a good millimeter too wide for the spacing of the wing top surfaces on the already-assembled wing. I filed the wing roots a touch before tracing the problem to the two tubular spacers which meet just behind the cockpit -- they're too long, pushing the forward fuselage out too wide for the lower piece carrying the cockpit to fit. I sawed a piece out of the braces, fiound I'd taken too much, and put in a .020" shim between them to take up the slack:
Then it was time to test fit the cockpit. Width-wise was not too bad, though the fit was sloppy. I added some styrene guides inside the lower fuselage part onto which I could flex the sidewalls for a better fit. The problem now was the vertical aspect. Having raised the rear cockpit so the GIB could see out even the smallest bit, the rear wall didn't fit under the top of the fuselage... I filed back both until they met acceptably (though introduced a gap...), and that's where I am right now:
Adding the instrument panels comes next, then get the assembly into the fuselage, add the wing and start working on the joints. The wingroots will use some putty, and the junction under the front of the wing will too, though I can probably get that fairly close. Then I can build up the intakes and get them into place, they look like they'll fit pretty close at this point. Slotted stabilators finish the main hull, the burner cans are painted, there's a clear part for the bottom of the recon module to mask and fit, then I'll be onto the canopies and masking...
Cheers, Mike/TB379