Work has continued the past few weeks. I am somewhat in awe of many of the model builders I follow who have such high production rates. My life keeps getting in the way of modeling. But progress is being made.

At some point, I think HobbyBoss contemplated including interior detail with this model but dropped the idea. For instance, the rear fuselage section could have been built either connected or separated from the forward fuselage. The engine was in three pieces. The compressor and a two piece tailpipe with detail on the outside of the tailpipe, never to be seen once it was put in place.

I believe the old Monogram kit had a removable tail section with a more complete engine.

By the way, the outside of the engine compressor had to be sanded down quite a bit to make it fit inside the rear fuselage.

Attaching the wing came next. And here there were some fit problems not caused by me. None of these comments are meant to denigrate this kit. I am enjoying building it. And, I regard fit issues as part of the hobby and merely present me with problems to be solved. It is all good.

The first issue was the poor fit where the front of the wing meets the fuselage. This was solved by cutting a small piece of plastic card to be cemented to the fuselage to change to angle of the leading edge of the wing so that the bottom of the wing piece would be flush.

The shim solved that issue. Which left the second issue, the gap between the top of the wing panels and the fuselage. This was easily solved with some putty.

We have reached the stage where I have to make some decisions on how to paint the model. The scheme I chose was the one on the box top.

The decals provide the dragon and the Navy blue stripe as two separate decals. Not having total faith in how well the decal will conform to the model, and also how I would match the exact color of the decal with the nose section I would have to paint separately?

I decided that the best way to tackle this one was to paint the nose blue, apply masking and then paint the silver over it. What could possibly go wrong? That remains to be seen.

I scanned the decals and printed them at 100%. Using the copy as a stencil, I cut some templates from Tamiya tape. While I was at it, I cut some templates for the antiglare panel and the tail stripes.

And, I painted the wheel and flap wells along with the dive brake recesses interior green and have started masking them.

All in all, I am pleased with the kit so far. I am glad that HobbyBoss chose to kit this important aircraft from the Forgotten War in my favorite scale.