Continued to work on assembly over the last few days:

the directions called for 40g of weight in the nose to keep it from being a tail sitter. After a quick Google search of "things that weigh 40g" I discovered that a nickel weighs 5g so 8 nickels totals to 40g. I glued them in stacks of 4 and secured them in the nose along with a single 2.5g penny just in case. Looks like I just added 41 cents to the cost of the build!
I added the nose (yes I decided against the Vector nose) and drilled out the nose guns with a #11 blade
you can see the progress so far along with the engines in the foreground starting to take shape
when I added the nacelles one side fit perfectly, the other side had such a large gap I had to use a styrene shim to close it!

Well that is certainly adding more than your two cents worth. You did a better job with the nacelle to wing join than I did.

1 attached image. Click to enlarge.

Perfect solution, David @dbutlr
I don't think any thief will ever search there to get his money.

@kahu- sounds like you are really upping the game with the aftermarket parts, looking forward to seeing the finished results when they come in. I passed on the nose and props but I did get the Aires wheel set to address the inaccuracies in the wheel. I did do some comparing of the kit props and the Vector ones and was left scratching my head as to what the team at ICM was thinking when they did theirs- they specifically had to make new tool parts for the B-26k and still wound up getting it wrong when it came to the props. For me being on a tight budget I will just deal with it this time but if I build this kit a 2nd time around I will get the props and nose

Neat idea using the coins. The kit nose isnt so bad once is all together, I myself could've lived with it. Any other plane I would just enhance the cockpit, wheels, and decals. The B-26K is one of my favorite air frames which has me stepping up and gettting some extras. The first example built back in the 90's was base on what was known at the time no clue on the wheels until, the Paragon set was easy to use to modify the Monogram B-26C kit, (black plastic glass nose) it was easy to convert with minor surgery. It was a few years later more information became available about the details that made the K so much more different than just some cosmetic add ons. Such as the wheels, avionics, scoops. Meteor Productions, AKA Cutting Edge produced a B-26K conversion with a bit more details and the correct wheels. Expensive and much harder to convert. And now extremely rare and more expensive. But it is designed for the Monogram kit. The only thing useful now for the ICM would be the wheels if you can find them. But Hypersonic finally has produced the ultimate correct wheels. Now for the Congolese version, the wheels from Aries will work as they were used on the earlier produced "K's". I also suffered the same fate with the wide gap on the LH side nacelle. The RH side fit was perfect. Same issue on the earlier variant kits offered by ICM. I was hoping it was my booboo on the B-26C I built earlier, but no it is a common issue so far on all their B-26's

These engines look wonderful, my friend @dbutlr!

The R-2800s are one of the solid good things in the kit, too bad once the cowlings are on most of the detail will be hidden.