The plan for today was to get everything ready for painting. I cut all of parts to be added off the sprue and cleaned them up. I determined which set of drop tanks I needed and assembled them.
Getting the fuselage ready was a little more work. The first thing I needed to do is the thing I hate the worst: re-establishing the panel lines that have been lost. I hate this task because I am not very good at it, and I usually end up giving myself more work because the tool jumps off-track and creates a new line that I have to fill. This plane was even more difficult because the panel lines are very wide. There wasn't really a good way to match the width of the existing line, so I just did the best I could and hopefully the mismatched widths won't be too noticeable. I got all the lines done that I planned to do, and then repaired all of the inadvertent lines that I added. Finally I polished all of the plane's surface with an old t-shirt. I gave the plane one last check, and, of course, discovered a phantom seam on top of the fuselage. I added more filler to the seam, let it dry, and then sanded and polished it. I think it is ready to go.
5 attached images. Click to enlarge.