From my review at M2 of doing this kit:
The kit is basically quite simple to build, and following the instructions revealed only the following "areas of difficulty":
When assembling the cowling and engine, you should follow these steps in this order:
-
Assemble and clean up the cowling and paint the interior.
-
Paint, assemble and clean up the engine, without the exhaust stacks.
-
Once the engine is set up, sand down the "blocks" on the ends of the sleeve valves, until the engine will slide easily into the cowling.
-
Attach the exhaust stacks.
-
Attach the engine inside the cowling.
The other area of difficulty is the instrument panel. It does not want to fit, and the only way I eventually found to get it to do so was to remove the mounting ridges inside the fuselage half and sand down the panel till it fits the internal shape correctly. In the process, I managed to screw up the instrument decals, so I ended up painting the instruments in the panel.
Other than that, things fit well, though I suggest you open up the mounting holes in the fuselage and wings for the cabane and interplane struts to obtain better final fit of the struts.
While I used the old Inpact cowling on this model - cleaned up internally to allow use of the Roden engine and exhaust stacks - this was only because I personally feel it "looks better." Had I not had one available, I would have happily used what was in the new kit.
Because this is something of a "limited run" kit, be sure to "test fit twice and glue once." I found I needed to re-shape the landing gear attachment area so it would fit to the fuselage properly; this was a matter of a few minutes with a sanding stick and some test-fitting till all was right.
