Off to a great start Martin. But boy o' boy, your wife is gonna be cheesed off when she goes to make cupcakes and finds out you used her cupcake tins to mix paint.

Martin, the D520 is a great kit and fun to build. I've built two of them, first one when it was first released required no filler at all, truly a shake and bake it. The second on I built last year, it's here on iModeler, I ran into the fuselage seams seemed to have a "V" shape when assembled which lead to a lot of filling and sanding and restoring lost detail. So watch for that on your kit. The only other fiddley bit is the alignment of the wheels to the gear struts,

Have fun with it great paint schemes available.

Rick

Hello again. Back from a long (and very ejoyable) vacation, happy to report that I've been doing some progress on the Dewoitine.

Looking good Martin, the cockpit is tricked out quite nicely.

Thanks everyone for the fine comments, the story continues today.

I have run into a problem with my Tamiya D.520. It's personal. I don't like the shape of its nose.

I was always of the impression that the D.520 was a beautifully streamlined aircraft, the "French Spitfire". With its straight lines and pronounced angles, the nose in the Tamiya kit breaks the otherwise fine lines of the model, looking out ou place - like it belonged to an MS.406 rather than the Dewoitine.

Time to check the references - goodbye the OOB experience!

I started looking around the web for photos, and found something interesting. Click on the images to see full-size version, it is really necessary to see what I mean.

What do you think? Advice needed. Or am I just imagining things.

Uh fellas, need I remind you all that this is imodeler.com and not Hyperscale? I do not think anyone here would criticize about shape and contour unless it was something spectacularly bad. There are no perfect kits because there are no perfect modelers. Look at what I am dealing with, a kit that is forty-plus years old. There are tons of imperfections with the Revell 1/32 Hawker Hurricane. I will correct the ones that I can correct and leave the ones I cannot correct (or are not worth correcting ) alone. At the end of the day, I will have a Hurricane. Go with what you got, Martin. I am sure it will look like a Dewoitine when it is finished.

Martin, I think that if you look at pictures of surviving D.520's you'll find that the Tamiya kit is correct for the aircraft on display at the French Museum of Air & Space which I believe was the "master". You will also find that the D.520 that has been restored to flying condition has the more streamlined piece behind the spinner. So I think they are both correct. Being in the close enough is good enough crowd, if I wanted the smoother cowling, I would do some sanding and blending on the kit part to make it less angular, and call it a day.

However, it is your model so do what you gotta do to keep your gremlins at bay... 😉