Looking great indeed, my friend @airbum!
And looking forward to your orange!

Looking good, Erik. It's always an exciting stage to have the canopy masks on and the inner frame gets painted right after. I often experience a surge of building/painting activity after the masking stage and forget to photograph that part in itself. I have lost a number of model parts along the way with my excessive number of ongoing builds. Some even get inadvertently chucked in the garbage with empty sprues and used cleaning materials. These I usually find when I start emptying my workroom wastebasket on the floor as a last resort. Almost everything eventually turns up somewhere, although some recent exceptions required emergency scratchbuilding.. The worst was losing an entire upper section for the port aileron on my Airfix Vickers Valiant (a very big part). Fortunately, it was so flat that I was able to replace it with a section of sheet styrene. Otherwise it would have been a disaster for such an expensive kit. Good creative solution on your tail wheel fairing. Sheet styrene is handy stuff.

Looking forward to seeing this project done. The Nanzan is such a sleek-looking aircraft that deserves to be seen.

Erik, @airbum
I think we all have experienced losing a part at some time or another. I remember losing a complete propeller in the past, for a 1/48 scale Tamiya F4F Wildcat. In hindsight my big German Shepherd likely found it and chewed it to bits. She was a pup at the time and ha her adult teeth coming in.

I like the creativity you have shown here, and how you are making a replacement to make up for the loss.

Sadly all has come to a halt here due to lack of spareparts for my airbrushes. I have tried to order them but the importer is not easy to rush.

The end date for this group build will not be strictly enforced, so please finish your work

So to quote the group rules, I think I shall make full use of the rule quoted here 🙂
Hope to get the needed parts soon, or else I will have to get a new airbrush of a brand that I know stocks spareparts in-country. . . .

Erik,
My friend, I am terribly sorry to hear about your air brush problems. Not having a hobby store nearby also is not good either. Sadly our local hobby shop has moved even farther away from what they were. Now it is at least a 100 mile round trip journey ! To make things worse, the traffic on the Interstate 4 is horrible... So I have consigned myself to shopping online. Which will show up with some new Eduard kits. Our LHS didn't stock anything Eduard made, so That's why I didn't have much of those kits in the stash. Now that has changed. 🙂

In preparation for the upcoming "Luftwaffe" group build, I have stocked up on some Eduard Over Trees boxes of FW-190's and Bf-109's for starters.

Please don't worry about not making the deadline... In fact, I have thought about removing the deadline altogether. This way we can all continue to work on our projects and not have to be stressed about making a deadline.

Life is too short to worry about things like this.

Good luck with finding parts for your airbrush. About a year ago I purchased a Harder and Steenbeck Evolution. It came with two different sized needles, and is made in Germany. One is a 0.020 for small detail work, while the other is a 0.040 tip for painting larger areas. It is rather expensive, but it is a magnificent tool for all sorts of painting.

Great - FANTASTIC - to see this build heading forward once again, Erik!
The brighter colours always catch the eye and definitely need a little more work for proper coverage.
Definitely worth the wait to see this model closer to completion.

Nice to see the orange applied, my friend @airbum!

Thank you all gentlemen. @coling, @georgeswork, @lis, @fiveten, @lgardner and @johnb, another minor update on this one has arrived.

Let there be light

With the tailwheel fairing done, a fairing is installed and nav lights gets started

I came to realise the trainer version did not have the bomb / Torpedo apparatus in the open, so a plate was installed.

With the new parts I could not resist a picture with the propeller on. It will need a repaint and such, but just to see it to imagine the finished plane. . .

I think we have discussed the navlights earlier, and I took the opportunity to carve out the rest of the fairing and install some clear parts.

As usual it is clear sprue, only this time it was heated and flattened by a knifeblade and candle.

Usual procedure followed – coarse, fine and extra fine sanding stick

And finishing off with a polish. These were coloured plastic, and no bulb is drilled as it will be hard to see anyway, and the clear parts are also rather thin.

And with that it is back into the box for some rest before I light up the paintbooth for this and multiple other builds waiting for the right temperature and dry weather