Thanks, Spiros (@fiveten) and John (@johnb). So far, I have only lost one piece of an actuator. It must be a record for me.

Great progress, George. Your intake looks awesome. Dealing with the intake is the hardest part of any F-16 model.

Great progress, my friend @gblair! Great that the Revell masks fit, also great that you found these files for free.

I have entered the Twilight Zone. Yesterday I thought I would be ready to paint the fuselage today, but the small bits are really demanding a lot of time. The Tamiya kit does not have weapons, but interestingly there is a pair of pylons included on the sprues. The pylons are not mentioned in the instructions and there are no locating holes that match the pins in the pylons. They appear to be for wing tanks, but there are none in the kit. I decided to rob all of the weapons pylons from the Hasegawa kit, mainly because they would match some of the weapons I am stealing from the kit. There are no locating holes in the Tamiya wing at all, so this will be an "eyeball" operation. I don't have a pylon for the Sniper Pod, but I think there is one available in Hasegawa's Weapons Set IX, which I think I have somewhere in my garage (hopefully). I still hope to get to painting tomorrow.

6 attached images. Click to enlarge.

Looks very good, George @gblair
Nice work on the 3D printed parts

Attaching the landing gear at early stages has its pros and cons, my friend @gblair. Looking forward to your progress.

Nice work on that Sniper pod, George.

I jumped into the two-color gray camouflage using Tamiya paints. Once the lighter gray was airbrushed onto the plane, I masked for the darker gray and sprayed it on also. I planned to use Tamiya Clear Gloss to get ready for the decals, but the cupboard was bare when I went to get the paint. As a substitute, I used Vallejo Clear Gloss. I diluted it about 35% and then sprayed it on the model.

This is where things unraveled a little. I was cleaning my workbench with a paper towel damp with some alcohol. When I was done I noticed that I had splashed a little alcohol onto the left wing of the model. Of course, it now had 3 big areas where the alcohol had eaten away the paint. After some colorful language, I masked the previously painted areas to protect them from a respray of the wing. Everything was good until I removed the masking tape. This is when I discovered that the Vallejo clear gloss was peeling up with the tape. More colorful language, followed by some sanding, followed by repainting the damaged areas.

I figured I could re-gloss the wing later, so I decided to start on the decals. The decal set I have came from Two-Bobs, and was printed by MicroScale, so I figured they would work well. The first thing you notice about the decals is that they have even the smallest stencils depicted in the decals, some are only a fraction of a millimeter in size. Each stencil is a separate decal, so there are a lot of decals to place on the model. The next thing you notice is the decals are very thin and will fold over on themselves very quickly. The last thing you notice is that the decals don't seem to like MicroSet to help them into place. If you use MicroSet to moisten the area before applying the decal, it will stick where it first lands and resists efforts to move it into place. I used water only and the decals worked fine. Once they were in place and dry, I used Solvaset on them to snuggle them down. It took two hours to put the decals on the missiles and pods, and another hour on the few decals I have added to the plane. This will be a long process. :o)

10 attached images. Click to enlarge.