Won second place with my Il-2 at Slovenia's National Championship competition! Yay!

Awesome, Sebastijan (@inflames)! Both of your entries received well-deserved credit. It was a pleasure to follow along on your build.

Congratulation, Sebastijan @inflames.
Absolutely well deserved.

G'day Sebastijan (@inflames),
Congratulation on 2nd place for your Il-2 - and 3rd (?) for the other aircraft (what is that?).
Well deserved.

So, it has been a couple of months since I have touched the Zvezda single seater.

Here I glued the fuselage halves together, hiding all that work on the engine!

As is often the case, the engine interfered with the fit and this caused a stress crack in the nose. So, I had to file a little of the cylinder heads away in order to close it up.

The seams were not good and I used super-glue to fill the upper and lower nose seams but the rear fuselage, being wood and therefore completely smooth on the real aircraft, was just (heavily) sanded smooth. This also removed the mid-fuselage join.

3 attached images. Click to enlarge.

Great progress, my friend @michaelt! Fit adventures only consume your time, since your superb skills fully cope with them. Looking forward to your progress!

G'day Spiros (@fiveten) and John (@johnb),
Thanks for the comments.
Of course, fit issues are fixable, but don't you wish we didn't have to?
There is a definite contrast with the Tamiya kit.

Nice work, Michael (@michaelt). I have never build a Zvezda kit, but it certainly seems over-complicated. The Accurate Miniatures two-seater I built also seemed over-engineered in places. The kits I have built with full engines in them always seem to have fit issues. It looks like everything is coming together well.