Well done @fiveten - looking great! (and thanks to @pikofix for the heads-up on the wheel bays)

So all honor and hats off. I know this kit and it's terrible. It can be seen that in skilled hands it can be made into a beautiful model. Congratulations.

Good job!
I built that kit as a teenager and despite it being a terrible kit, it was surprisingly good fun. I added an electromotor and LED navigation lights to it, since the fuselage had plenty of room for that stuff.

It was fun! The LEDs were a bit oversized though (all I could get in those days), but it was nice to bring it to life. I figured since the kit itself wasn't too good, it would go some way compensating for that (and it did as I have fond memories of it).

In 1995 I stocked up on Směr kits during a visit to the Czech republic and this was one of them. Others were a Macchi floatplane racer (which I dropped out of my hands the minute in finished it; it shattered and it was in the bin the next minute as I had just spent several agonising hours rigging the b-st-rd and would definitely not want to repeat that!). Another was a Walrus, which was nice and bulky and surprisingly impressive sitting on the shelf. Yet another was a "1/48" Savoia SM 79, which I still have, but I reckon it's not worth building. I'm not even sure I can be bothered to use it as a paint mule it's that bad! Lastly there was a 1/72 Dewoitine D.520, which was a copy of the classic Heller kit (which I had built in the past), but including a pilot, and good fun to build. All in all a variety of experiences with these chunks of plastic, but at least they didn't break the bank! 🙂

This kit reminds me of the Classic Airframes P-43 Lancer kit I built in 2002. That kit was an absolute horrid kit. I had to add a nearly 1/4" plug in the fuselage because it was too short. But the fun part of it was the research I did on one of the Australian Lancers used for photo recon. I have a sizable set of reference photos now because of it.

Thanks my friend @gblair!

Spiros(@fiveten), the Dora Wings kit is far better (although it does have PE cowl flaps). About the only thing the CA kit is good for is the resin parts, and then only some of those.

It's probably no worse than the SMER kit you built here, but if you have a desire to build a P-43, then the Dora Wings kit is worth the money. Less heartache and and as I have heard Tom (@tcinla) mention in the past, far fewer purple clouds over the work bench. 🙂