Great paintwork on that camo scheme, Michael @michaelt

G'day Tom (@tcinla),

As noted previously, for the first build I followed Eduard's instructions with the wings while for this one I glued one upper wing first and then attached it to the fuselage. That was a big mistake as it shewed the lower wing/fuselage alignment, although I managed to recover from this. Then I glued the second upper wing in place.

Do not do this!

Next time - and you know there will be a next time - I'll follow your method of attaching the lower wing to the fuselage first.

On both kits, however, I was left with a small gap on the rear lower wing/fuselage join and it seems to me that the lower wing must be a tad short. I'm not sure that there was a step, though.

Thanks for watching.

Unmasked!

The camouflage is done now. I added some white to the Ocean Grey and Dark Green and over-sprayed to give a textured, sun faded effect.

I masked and painted the RAF red-white-blue fin flash because severe weathering shows the red under the white over-paint making it a RAAF fin flash. I'll achieve this effect by masking using the salt method, as I did for the first Spitfire, and pray white again.
I have yet to mask and paint the RAF yellow wing leading edge that will show through a worn white leading edge - salt method, again.
This aircraft also has the RAF Sky fuselage band showing through the over-sprayed RAAF Foliage Green. I achieved this by first painting the Sky band and then using masking fluid before spraying the Foliage Green, although it was not as easy as I had hoped to paint the masking as I wanted it.
Finally, you can see the RAAF colours that will be under the fuselage roundel. These will give a halo effect around the RAAF roundel - which was a modified RAF roundel with the red painted white and the outer yellow ring painted out with RAAF camouflage colours.
Although the paint guide indicated that this aircraft had small upper wing roundels, with similar RAAF camouflage colours overpainting the large RAF ones, my research indicates that this could have just as likely been the larger RAF roundel with the red centre painted white.
As I can't find a photo to confirm it either way, I have decided to use the larger roundel to give it a further difference to the first Mk VIII (see above).

2 attached images. Click to enlarge.

Wow! That is a wonderful paint job, my friend @michaelt!

Thanks, Spiros (@fiveten).

I masked the tail fin flash with masking fluid and painted the white.
The photo in the book shows the wear on the tail of the aircraft.

2 attached images. Click to enlarge.

Really nice result, my friend @michaelt!

Decals applied.
The mouth was a pain. It comes in four parts, the middle tow which are expected to conform to the compound curve under the nose. I ended up slicing the black sections to get them to fit and now I have to smooth out the overlapped parts and touch up a few gaps.
I'd rather that they had supplied masks to paint the black centre and decals for the teeth and lips.
In spite of a gloss surface, the stencil decals have silvered, the same as for the first build.
The main markings are printed by Cartograf and, apart from the mouth, performed flawlessly.
As I understand it, the stencil decals are printed by Eduard and I wish they had left that to Cartograf as well.

Next I'll give it a flat coat and weather it, another flat coat and then add the undercarriage, antenna mast, etc.

Oh, and the exhausts. The upper cowling is just attached using blu-tack at the moment.

Nearly done.

3 attached images. Click to enlarge.