The resin parts of the engine nozzle have been cleaned and primed with Gunze Mr Surfacer 1200. Detail is very good except for the flame stabilizer that shows heavy flash. I found it a process too little rewarding to remove the excess resin from this very fragile part and decided to use the original kit one instead.

It was a great moment when I removed the sprue from the parts with the turbine blades. The blades are merged to the sprue originally and sawing it off suddenly let's the space between the blades appear.

Note the green paint typical for Soviet aircraft inside the nozzle being partly burned of. The metal parts have been painted with different shades of Alclad2.

7 attached images. Click to enlarge.

Up next: the cockpit.
There is no such thing as THE Russian cockpit green, but I learned the hard way: Mr. Paint`s interpretation of Russian cockpit green and Eduard's are kind of different.
I mixed the matching tone myself.

I've heard through the grapevine that this colour was selected to give the pilot a feeling of wellbeing and thus increasing their performance. Comments highly appreciated ...

3 attached images. Click to enlarge.

Thanks, George.
Cockpit parts finished, all sealed with a layer of Mr. Colour Semi Gloss, now awaiting fitting and weathering.

3 attached images. Click to enlarge.

Very nice preparation pics, Halvar...how do you achieve a completely white background with no shadows?

Some oil dot fading was applied to the wheel wells that had been primed and painted in Gunze Neutral Gray before and finally a black-brownish oil wash brought their look reasonably close to the reference.

5 attached images. Click to enlarge.

I used a, at least for me, relatively new product for the nose cone: flexible Tamiya tape. The performance is as you'd expect it from Tamiya, conforming nicely to the cone in spite of strongly different radii at upper and lower end.

2 attached images. Click to enlarge.

Now to the assembly of the airframe.

The fit of this Eduard kit is not perfect, but it doesn't deserve much criticism either. You can feel the ambition to make an outstanding design, but you can also find engineering solutions that show some lack of experience or simply went wrong.

Like many modellers today I use super thin cement, in this case the one from Gunze that I find even more pleasant than the one from Tamiya. Joining the fuselage halfs, I forced them in the desired position with the help of a dozen of clamps, tweezers and rubber bands. A number of strokes of the brush to follow and that's it. The fuselage halfs are thinker than usual in this kit leading to a stiff structure and a will of their own regarding aligning to each other. Nothing to worry about but the joints certainly require some filling. Rescribing of lost panel lines is therefore mandatory.

The only major fit issue of the air frame is the wing root joint. Both sides' upper wing halfs miss 0,25 mm to fit to the fuselage - constantly over the whole length of the joint, if you properly align the edges and outer joints. You may of course compromise here to narrow the gap there, but it remains a problem. I know from iModeler fellows that they used liquid filler here, but I wanted to avoid sanding at the wing roots after assembly to not to ruine the nice surface detail and I wanted a strong joint to resist robust handling of the model later on.

Evergreen plastic card (0,25 mm), glued to the wing and carefully sanded, solved the problem.

11 attached images. Click to enlarge.