Thank you Christopher, much appreciated!

Great idea to use the brass tube, in order to reinforce the tailplane structure, my friend @maxw!

Been a while (busy on the golf courses!) but it's finally time to address the elephant in the room...the engine and its exhaust ports! You'll remember the Silver Wings ones were too short and didn't quite reach the collector ring so I cut them off. Since then I've given shed loads of thought and several "experiments" with different materials including wire, resin, plastic and brass tube in order to solve the best way of replicating the distinctive appearance of the Gauntlet nose:

I finally settled on 1.6mm plastic rod, having first fixed the engine in its position in the engine cowling. Only by firstly doing this could I determine the length of each piece of rod, it worked out at approximately 4.5mm, but it did vary slightly. 18 of these were required, final result isn't perfect but looks ok to my (only slightly jaundiced) eyes!

All that remained then was the tripod arrangement in 3 positions around the engine/cowling:

It all looks quite business-like, I'm looking forward to getting this onto the front end of the fuselage, hopefully on Wednesday.

Looks great, Max (@maxw). It is amazing how visible all of these modifications really are. Well done.

I decided I wasn't 100% happy with the engine so "deconstructed" it, the 3 "tripods" in particular weren't right in my opinion so I adjusted them:

Then fitted the engine into the cowling and added the prop:

Then of course I couldn't resist just temporarily "tacking" the unit onto the front:

The empennage is pretty much complete apart from a few delicate bits to be added later, and now it's the undercarriage being addressed:

impressive!

Looks wonderful so far, my friend @maxw!