Looks great, Carl (@clipper). It always seems that all of the tanks and bombs take longer to build than the plane itself. All of the added small bits will definitely busy things up.

Another round of great detailing, Carl @clipper
Not that easy to get rivets around that section.

Tail area is looking great, Carl (@clipper). Great idea to do one side at a time, but it looks like the first side worked well. I have never tried adding rivets, so I guess I will need to add it to the list of things to learn. The new rivets really improve the appearance of the area.

It's so true that the last 15% of a model build (before painting) takes 80% of the time to accomplish. Working on all the little details, landing gear, hanging bits, and other items makes for slow picture days. SO it took a while before I had enough to post anything new. I was originally going to wait until I had weathered all of this, but that will be at least another day or two.

Anyway, I completed the work on the lower dive brakes. This mainly meant adding some stiffeners to the doors. These were teeny tiny and there were four of them that had to fit against a curved surface, so they each had to be made by hand. Difficult to say the least. This is one of those areas where a 3D printer would have been super handy.

I started detail painting the aft cockpit turtledeck based upon the one image I have. There is a wire that needs to be added but I am not sure just what it connects to. Weathering has not been accomplished on this yet.

The loadout on this model will be two 200 gallon drop tanks, two AIM-9 sidewinders, a Bullpup missile, and the ARA-25 Guidance pod. The pod does not come with the kit, so I will have to scratch build it. The Sidewinders and and Bullpup missiles are aftermarket items which should be delivered tomorrow (kit ones are so so).

The drop tanks from the kit were devoid of any detail so I added weld seams along the sides, and a few panel lines. I also added the circular access panel for filling them. Seams on this were not great so I've fill them with Vallejo putty which I will clean up a bit more after it has dried.

The outer wing navigation lights were given small bulbs and added to the wings along with the pitot tube.

The canopy has a semi circular support piece according to my one good photo so I tried to replicate this

The landing gear was replaced with Scale Aircraft Conversions white metal gear, mainly because the nose gear has the proper full extension (unlike the kit part). Otherwise these white metal parts are direct copies of the kit parts (including mold seam lines which were not cleaned off the originals before molding them). The tires and wheels are CAT4 resin parts. I added brake lines and painted everything. I still need to weather these as well.

I am also starting to work on the paint masks for the markings, but I first had to decide on a scheme. I wanted to build this as an aircraft on the carrier deck diorama. However, I liked this scheme the best which apparently comes from a familiarization squadron. I reasoned that they probably familiarized the pilots with deck landings as well, so having them on the deck for my diorama is plausible.

Anyway, it might be a while longer before I have more to post as there are still many smaller tasks to accomplish.

Thanks Tom (@tcinla). Most of these should be possible using spray masks. The one I am not sure about yet is the red intake warning. Masking for the red is easy enough, but the lettering is too small and unfortunately, the Hobby Boss lettering is misspelled ("Danger Jet In Take" - 4 words instead of " Danger Jet Intake").

The serial number under the tail is also too small to mask. I was going to look through my other kits and my decal stash to see if I can put together some of this. I'll look around to see if I can get a copy of the Hobbycraft Decals.

Some impressive progress, Carl @clipper
The tail hook looks really good, as does the work done on the landing gear.

Thanks, JOhn (@johnb), Spiros (@fiveten), and George (@gblair).

Tom (@tcinla) and George, It turns out that the decals are in the Matchbox kit. I went looking for them on Ebay and could only find kits with $40 plus price tags. Too much to justify the expense. Thanks for looking George.

As I mentioned previously, if I can find some small numbers for the serials (and perhaps the smaller numbers), I can probably make the Hobby Boss "Jet Intake" red decal work by matching the color of the decal red and slicing the decal to move the "In" and "Take" closer together. In the meantime, if other options present themselves, I will definitely take advantage of them if I can.

Hi Carl (@clipper): I just checked and I have the FJ-4 version, but not the FJ-4A version. I have never had the Matchbox version, so that's also a dead end. $40 for the old Matchbox seems really high. I guess at some point they go from being cheap and old to collectible and expensive. Sorry.