Looking over the instructions, I decided to follow them as there are a LOT of quite small parts. Indeed, the interior seems to harbor 30-40 of these things. Building it up doesn't help when SH decides that we need to have a number of the black parts (the interior is supposed to be black) printed in solid black so there is NO detail shown on just how the bits assemble. One has to look ahead at other steps where there is a line drawing to help us out. Eventually, I got all the parts in place and after adding a bit of nose weight and doing some sanding on the cockpit assembley, Trapped the cockpit within the fuselage halves. I did not get the front instrument panel assembly attached before closing the fuselage and that was a major mistake as it was a real chore to install later.

Next I built up the engine items. In hindsight, you can leave off pretty much all the parts aft of the front engine pieces as you won't be able to see them unless you shove a flashlight in the exhaust and it will help the other pieces fit better. Note also that the diameter of the piece you do keep should be thinned down to help the wing halves fit better. When attaching the intake pieces D5/6, ensure that they are slightly recessed or you won't get the intake rings to fit. I didn't do any of these and getting the wings done was a bit of a nightmare that was only 'solved' with filler and a lot of sanding.

Another note is that the upper wing center section opening has to be widened and made deeper so that the interior will properly fit. The fit of the four piece wheel well was not good and it was fussy to get it assembled in the first place. This is because there is no positive locator for the gear well. Once the wing was done, it, along with the horizontal stabs were attached. Then followed the usual filler/sanding routine for the wing as the forward attachment area was quite poor. Next, the canopy was masked using Special Mask 72031 and the canopy was attached., Fit is not good and I had to use Cemendine to help fill some of the gaps.

At this juncture, it was off to the paint shop. This plane was in dark green and medium sea grey. For the two shades I used Model Master enamels. I first did the grey as it covered most of the airframe. Next a massive amount of masking was done and the dark green sprayed on. When dry, the radome area was masked around and that was painted black.

Meanwhile the landing gear was taken care of. The fit of the main gear isn't very good. The issue is the placement of the gear wells. When these are installed, they need to be installed onto the upper wing sections with the gear attachment points so positioned that they are a fair distance from the edge of the well on the lower wing. Not doing so will result in insufficient room to attach the inner door. I'll have to remember this for future builds.  Interestingly the gear wells were in the underside color, but the gear was aluminum.

With the gear in place, the airframe was given a coat of clear gloss acrylic in preparation for decals. Generally, I found the decals to be rather brittle. I had issues with several of the insignia and other color decals chipping while moving them in place. I was able to replace the damaged insignia from an ancient Microscale sheet(72-18) that I recoated with Microscale Decal Film prior to using. The others are very thin and I had issues with them folding on the larger markings.

Once the decals were on, I sprayed on a semi-gloss clear coat as these planes came glossy from the factory and weathered a bit in service. Then a myriad of smaller bits were attached like the gear doors, gun barrels, pitot tube, upper and lower antennas and a rather poor fitting centerline fuel tank. The wing tanks were attached and the impossible-to-attach wingtip lights were replaced with Cemendine clear glue. Finally, the masking was removed and the inevitable bleed under was scraped clear best I could.