Excellent job so far, my friend @pikofix!

I spent the last two days painting the model, and I am almost done. The metal parts are Vallejo’s Metal Color range. These are my new favourite metallic paints, looks great, easy to use and somewhat less toxic than Alclad.
The wooden parts are Tamiya acrylic base and oil paints, but I need to do some touch up and a final layer of Tamiya colored clear.
The clear doped paints are from AK Interactive. Probably they are at the end of their shelf life, because I had hard time using them in the airbrush. As I recall, they worked fine when I built the SG-38, so maybe I should buy new ones… Or make custom mixes from Tamiya paints.
I decided to use Tamiya Olive drab on top of a brown-yellow patchy base as PC10.
And for some reason, I also went for masking the insignias. The bottom wing looks great, but the fuselage and upper wings are less than ideal, because the thin white outer ring was tricky to mask, and I also got some small overspray here and there. Hopefully it will look better after oil washes.

So, slowly, but I am getting there.

Outstanding work, Csaba! Glad to see this one near the finish.

Really nice progress, Csaba @pikofix
To me all looks great on the fuselage.

Great progress and excellent looks so far, my friend @pikofix!
Those tail skids (and tail wheels and the like) are usually sensitive. You should be able to easily fix yours.
The varnish "mistake" is really hard to notice.
Looking forward to your next steps!

@johnb It is barely visible, I noticed after taking the photos. I missed a spot with the matt varnish, it will be easy to fix. I tried to imitate the different surface material with varnishes, the bare metal parts got Vallejo´s gloss metal varnish, the wooden parts a satin finish, and everything else a matt coat.

@fiveten thanks, it will be mainly assembly and rigging from this point. I still have a few tiny parts left on the photoetched sheet and a few plastic ones for the fuselage and wings. First I want to finish the rigging, just to avoid any accidents with those tiny, easy-to-break parts.

I have a faint memory of my father building an airplane model for me. I am not even sure if it is a real memory, or just placed in my head by my mother, when she told me about that. I was still in kindergarten or maybe just started elementary school, and I got an airplane kit. I was too small to build it, so my father tried to do it for me, but he gave up and it ended up in the trash bin. If I really try to think about it, then I see a biplane. This happened in the 1980s in Hungary, so if memory is right, the kit was most probably a KP, or Frog box, maybe a Po-2 or a Letov biplane.
Without any modelling tools, knowledge and patience, the project was deemed to be a failure. Unfortunately I can’t ask my father about that - he died before he turned 40.

A few years later I got my first model kit (that I can remember). It was really exciting standing in the small shop in front of the boxes. I was unable to decide what I want, soo many options, so many ideas, and I had only one option!

Why all of these memories? I tried to glue the wing struts onto the lower wing and fuselage, and it was just awful. First, Eduard’s design is very precise, and the tolerances are very small. The small amount of primer and paint in the location holes made dry fitting impossible.
Once those were cleaned and the struts glued in, I started the never ending loop of finding the proper wing geometry… Since the struts were glued on the lower wing only, I could not keep the upper wing in position, not even with the assembly jig. One side was always popping out, the outer front struts did not reach the wing, the smallest bump on the jig misaligned everything in a split second.
I took the frequent use of swear words as a warning sign, and left the whole thing in the jig, somewhat aligned, and hopefully I will be able to align it better in the coming days. I did not want to end this model up in the trash can, just like the first ever model kit in our home.

1 attached image. Click to enlarge.

Looking good! Almost there.