Hi all - its been a while since my last update on this project!
The lower wings and fusealge are now together. The lower wings come as a single piece which includes the centre section of the fuselage belly and a short amount of the fusealge sides above the lower wing. The upper decking that sits around the cockpit is also a separate part. I found that the fusealge and wings did not line up and required alot of pressure and superglue to get everything to fit. Most noticable was that if I got the fit of the belly right that there was a large and noticable step at the fuselage side - if I fixed the step in the fusealge side, the belly did not line up. Sigh. So I picked the lesser of two evils and lef the step on the fuselage sides. This whoel process meant a fair amount of clean up was required. I suspect that some of these issues was due to the soft plastic roden use and the size of the parts.
All of the "persuasion" I used to get it all to fit had the converse effect for narrowing the upper decking opening. Using all three of my hands, I managed to spread open the fuselage halves enough to squeeze in the interior sub-assembly. I suspect that this would not have been an issue had I installed the interior before joining the fuselage halves, but I suspect that if I had of tried it this way that I would have done more damage to the interior trying to get the fuselage and wings to line up. To make matters worse, the upper decking didn't quite fit over the cockpit frames. Sigh. More superglue and pressure...
Through the clean up process I had managed to sand off most of the panel and hatch detail - not to worry as the Eduard etched fret has all of the hatches etc - all I had to do was re-scribe the panel lines (which I hate doing and screwed up a couple of times!)...
Anyways, here's the proof it's together to this point....
BC