Excellent progress, Colin @coling
The cord does add a lot to the cockpit as well as the nicely detailed IP.

Thank you Spiros@fiveten, John@johnb and Erik@airbum. It's great to get some affirming feedback. I will need to get some painting done soon to make more visible progress. IMO, detailing is worth the effort. Even so, but I haven't seen a project to completion in a while, so I will concentrate on getting this done and in headline in a couple of weeks.

Steady progress, Colin @coling
The boxes do look much better now.
Your own mixture of transparant blue did its job perfectly.

Thanks for your comments, John@johnb and Spiros@fiveten . Good to know someone is following this build. I appreciate your comments. It has been a couple of months since I posted but i have been busy recently with finishing, masking and painting. Lots of work, but I'll keep this brief. The main challenge was masking. Beyond the Eduard canopy masks, I had to figure out how to cover up the cabin interior with the doors off, since they were slightly in the way good paint coverage. I used a combo of foam rubber inside, Tamiya tape around the inside edges of the doorways and using the masked kit cockpit doors attached and sealed with white glue all around to protect the interior from overspray. I will see if it all worked when the masks come off. Here are the various stages leading up to application of the green camo pattern with cabin doors attached. I put these back on with with inside strips of masking tape to get proper alignment of the pattern between fuselage and the doors. pre-shade mottle with flat black and grey. Camo with Gunze Dark Sea grey - lightened with flat white and Tamiya NATO Green for the Marines Green used for the Lynx. Nice color. I am looking forward to getting the silly putty masks off but i am resisting the temptation until the paint is fully cured. . BTW, for what it's worth, I filled in the grey areas between the Silly Putty strips with scraps of Tamiya tape I had save from other masking jobs (mainly my Heinkel, now finished). It's a crazy quilt of tape but it is a lot cheaper than using new tape and I am quite happy with recycling/reusing the stuff. As Kermit says, it's not easy being green.

Hope you find this interesting so far. Next step should see some decaling done before I post again.

Looks wonderful, my friend @coling! Your masking techniques are superb! The slight rail mishap will be easily tackled by your skills. I too try to re-use masking material.
Looking forward to your progress!

Thanks, Spiros. I was surprised and pleased how well the Silly Putty worked. I think I am getting better at avoiding paint puddling up against it, which can make it too hard-edged. The slightly fuzzy edge is exactly what I was aiming for. Silly Putty is great but it's pretty unwieldy stuff; it's like wrestling snakes to get it down in just the right pattern.

Here is the latest progress. Although it isn't obvious, I did a lot of work on the camo, altering the shapes somewhat and cleaning up very small overspray errors. Models in 1/48 are such small canvases to work on that little errors really show up in the end. Attention to detail is essential, IMO. Anyway, with the colors all fixed, I applied a couple of very thin coats of Tamiya clear, did an oil wash and have now applied most of the decals. I was very apprehensive about how the Airfix decals would conform to the rivetting and raised panel detail. The decals were excellent in the end and the results good. The Microscale system worked very well to get them more or less "melted on" over the detail.

So now for the rest of the exterior, I have the skids and braces to paint black, a few more tiny decals to apply and a semi-gloss coat. I am pretty pleased with the decals for the rotor blades, They fit very well. The pics show the rotor friction fitted for now. It attaches pretty tightly without glue. I may leave it that way for easier transportation of the finished model to future model shows. BTW, I am leaving the large box type radiator off until the very end. They would get in the way of uniform mat coating. Interior bits to do are the windows for the cabin doors and the Eduard Etch for inside the doors. Hopefully that won't be too time-consuming. I am looking forward to getting the masks off. This one is coming along pretty fast now.

Looking very nice indeed, Colin @coling
Decals seem to came on nicely as well.