Neil,

Try using various shades of gray or darker blue for your staining. One of the things I learned from the RC guys is that panel lines are not black, they're just a darker shade of the base color. Think of it as the shadows in between panels. You might try a random light overspray of the dark blue lightened with white or yellow to simulate fading, which happened quite rapidly in the sun. Obviously, the upper wings, stab and fuselage will be more faded than the fuselage sides or undersides.

As for salt staining, I think a very light wash of very light gray applied sparingly would work. Just my 2 cents...

Not yet, Neil. My shop is in the garage, which is unheated and we actually had a winter this year. Don't have the luxury of extra space in the house just yet. The epoxy and filler putty got so cold I couldn't get them out of their respective containers! It's starting to warm up now, so I'm hoping to get some work in this weekend. Unfortunately, the wing didn't unwarp itself, so I'll still have to deal with that...

Very cool take on your Seafire. I like it.

If you look at photos, you will see very little weathering. You will not see sea spray residue on any USN airplane aboard a carrier, because that was a great way to turn an aluminum airplane into a pile of powder. The reason Glossy Sea Blue was adopted was because it doesn't weather. The only "weeathering" that happens to the paint is it can go from glossy progressively flatter - but it takes so long you would not see it on the average six month WestPac deployment of the time. You see exhaust staining is all, and what you see there starts with a gray base because the mixture was leaned out to maximize range and endurance.

Here's a good example:

1 attached image. Click to enlarge.

I just had a look and I have two sets of wings left over but they are both for the FR46 ,I don't think you actually said which version you are building but I suspect it's the 47,if you want them I can easily pop them in the post. I had the same problem with the fit at the wing root and where the aft section meets the fuselage, I slotted in a piece of evergreen in the gap and glued it all up then trimmed up the fillet when it was all dry,don't worry you'll get there in the end.
N.

If you are building the 47 the wing fold is an option, you can have them raised if you want or build them extended like I did on both my Seafires. I took the four pieces that make up the top of the wings (parts# 111,107,108,112) and glued them together using a flat glass chopping board to work on then did the same with the three pieces that make up the lower wing surface (#106,109,110) and then built the kit in the usual manner.Before I fixed the upper and lower wing surfaces together I re-inforced the joins by gluing a piece of evergreen styrene into the recess where the wing fold parts would have gone and when that was completely dry glued in a few strips across the wingfold join going lenghtways just to make sure it was a strong join, dry fitting as I went to make sure my strips of reinforceing didn't stop the wing halves from fitting snugly together,just make sure you are happy the wing profile hasn't gone too flat before gluing it all together,if you think it has then use some small bits of sprue to make a kind of spacer but I'm pretty sure mine were O.K..

I just had a look to see if you can interchange the wings and you can't its either one or the other as the low raised "dome" in the wing surface between the fuselage and the cannon bays is different also the chin section behind the prop is different and the cannons as well.The colour diagram shows the 46 without the camera bay but the history at the start of the instruction sheet says it was also used for photo recce.

Upper surface is indeed Extra dark sea grey (Humbrol 123) and the lower surface is called Beige Green on the sheet which is Humbrol 90 (the greenish colour) , my sheet says to blend the H90 with Satin varnish 135 but I didn't bother and it looks O.K. to me.

Hope this helps,N.