Here is another 32nd build I will be working on parallel with my Buffalo.

The Tempest is one of my favorite WW2 aircraft and it's an impressive monster in 1/32. I've really wanted to do this build for a while now but was put off by the work to do the Barracuda replacement nose. I finally had sufficient confidence and patience after the Shiden Kai was done. As I expected, removing the nose from the casting block was not easy, especially in avoiding damage to the core elements. It was about a day's work to saw everything apart following Barracuda's excellent instructions very carefully. In the end, as they say at NASA, "we have separation" and Stage 1 is done. Stage 2, sanding, came next. One extra complication was fitting the spinner and back plate to the nose. As the instructions say, the fit will not be perfect because the silicone molds for the resin apparently expand and distort through time. Sure enough, I had to spend another half day reworking the slightly oversize spinner through careful sanding. I am pretty happy with the results overall. The rest of the kit resin is just cockpit detail while the main styrene components have excellent fit. Pics show things taped together roughly to check. It's a beautiful model with very subtle and complete rivet detail. I love the lines of the Tempest and should enjoy this one. No excessive weathering on these late war birds. I haven't quite decided on the pilot/squadron but will probably do an aircraft one of these three aces: Jim Shedden, Evan Mackie or Roland Beaumont. It may come down to which had D-Day Stripes, because I like the look of these on the Tempest. More soon.

Litteraly a great big plane as well to build, Colin.
The nose is indeed looking fantastic.
I'm very interested in your next steps.

Nice job getting the resin nose cut out and attached, Colin (@coling). All the hard work looks like it was worth it. It looks like the resin is hollow. Probably a good thing, otherwise the plane might sit on its nose.

Thanks, Spiros, John @johnb, Erik @airbum, George @gblair and Tom @tcinla for your interest and comments on this build some time ago. Thank you for the build tips, Tom. I am taping things together as I go and will take special care with the wing halves now.

I have been working on this one on and off since my first posts 7 months ago. I didn't think it was worth posting until I had the cockpit done. Now that the work on the pit is behind me, I expect the rest of the build to go pretty quickly.

To summarize briefly, the majority of the components are straight OOB on the High Tech version of the kit, including resin, photo-etch and decals for the instruments. I worked on each part of the interior assemblage separately, painting the sidewalls and each side of the frame structure as well as doing an oil wash on each.

The floor elements also got weathering with CMK pigments . I added wiring from plastic coated copper wire used for magnetic coil winding. I painted this MM Acryl and Lifecolor paints in various grays. I used some of the kit decals for the labels on throttles and flap levers but found these tiny decals very difficult to apply and stick. I think the level of detail in the pit is quite good without some of these. The challenge is in careful painting and assembly so that parts do not collide with one another and can be painted the best way possible before being glued in place. It is worth commenting on the seat belt/harness arrangement as this required pre-fitting the harness to the seat armor before gluing int he seat. As you can see from this and previous photos, I taped the harness up and out of the way while fitting the seat. The belts are the cloth type with tiny buckles that took a day's work to thread the fabric through. They are some of the best I have seen of this type with great printed details. I also took some time with the IP by punching out the dial individually with my Waldron set, rather than using the large decals for each of the 3 panel sections. This allowed me to simulate the shininess of the glass over each dial face in contrast to the flat black panel. Here are the final pics of the completed pit before and after the tube assembly is glued to the fuselage side walls. You can also see the way it all looks inside the close fuselage, which is just taped together at this point.

I hope this all looks good to you at this stage. I will be gluing the fuselage halves together next after doing a bit of work on the tail wheel well assembly. BTW the Tempest is really massive. It makes my Bf-109G look quite fragile by comparison.

Happy modeling.

Thanks, Spiros @fiveten ! The build has been complex but fun so far. I hope to have it in camo soon. The next challenge will be the resin intake piece and kit screen components.

what a stunning progress, Colin @coling
That cockpit does indeed look very realistic.
In the last picture, the 109 looks a bit like a dwarf compared to the Tempest

Cockpit is looking awesome, Colin (@coling). I also like the Tempest, and thought I had missed the start of this great build, but then realized that you had taken a break from the build. I suspect if I was building this kit I would have stopped at the seatbelts. I have tried to thread the cloth seatbelts into buckles before, and my success rate has been exactly zero. A big pat on the back for getting them done and looking so good.

This kit has fought me all the way, but I have finally beaten down the worst roadblocks and am closer to completion. Since my last post, I glued the fuselage halves together and the wings and tail section on. Getting the resin nose on straight was quite tricky and I had to pry it off after gluing to fix the alignment a couple of times. I noticed the whole solid resin piece was skewed after the wings were attached. BTW - with all major plastic parts attached i.e. wings and tail planes, it became much easier to judge if the resin nose with intake was straight.

For the next stage, I had all seams sanded and all intake screens and filters in place in the intake and sealed up when I decided to try fitting the resin exhausts. At that point disaster struck! The boxes to accommodate the exhaust stacks - glued in from the inside – broke off and fell into the fuselage.

Once again, I had to pry off super-glued resin parts to reattach the boxes from the inside. I managed to get some of the intake fittings off with careful application of brute force. This was enough to refit the boxes and awkwardly slop some super glue inside to make sure they didn’t come off again. Bad idea not to do this carefully! The super glue managed to flow around inside the intake and leak downward and out around the front intake screen. It finally gooped all over the face of the screen and ruined all the paintwork and plastic surface. I was desperate to save it, so I ripped out all the intake interior and tried to wash the superglue off with soap, water and mild solvent. No go. The glue got through the paint and on to the plastic and permanently ruined the mesh facing of the intake screen. In addition, my efforts to pry everything off left gouges inside the resin intake and screen parts. I was almost ready to chuck the whole model. It seemed like a complete write-off. I even bought a completely new SH Tempest and Barracuda intake set to start all over again.
Then, I had second thoughts. What if I got some something to dissolve the caked-on superglue? Could I salvage the model I had worked so hard on? I found some super glue remover on eBay that is made in Poland. It is completely safe for styrene, resin and metal photoetch. Although it was pricey, it was well worth it. It melted away all the gooped-on mess inside the intake and off the parts that I hadn’t ruined from prying and scraping. It took a while – several days patient work - but I cleaned things up inside sufficiently to refit a new screen. The “new screen” actually came from the kit as an unused part that simply lacked the large hole in the center to accommodate the air filter. There are two of these in the kit which seem to come from some earlier version of the intake assembly - indicated as unused on the instructions. I carefully drilled this out and sanded the center hole larger than a drill bit would allow and kept checking and rechecking the fit of the filter inside. Success. The new screen was equal to the damaged part in every way.

The next challenge was to fill in the gouge marks inside the intake and sand the curved interior surface from inside without distorting the interior shape. This took several days again, using a combination of super glue/zap kicker and then Mister Surfacer 1000 for the final smoothing out. Finally, it was 100% restored. I then proceeded to the stage of refitting the intake interior parts, including the re-crafted screen. I modified how the parts fitted together this time to make them stand up better to the pressures of snapping everything into place. Working inside the solid resin intake is almost maddeningly restrictive to movement but after all the sanding and cleaning I have now done to rescue the model , I have gotten used to it.

So, I didn’t take any pictures of the intake disaster before I fixed it, since it was too depressing to contemplate. I have a few pics of the fully cleaned up model with clear parts test fitted.

I will attach the gun sight next, glue in the windscreen and mask all the clear parts for painting. I am happy with the stretched sprue filling I did to get a good fit of all parts. Everything is nicely sanded smooth without loss of any of the fine rivet retail on either resin or plastic parts. Time for some primer and paint for the undersides!