Thank you, Allan.

The original 916 came with a previously unseen colour of the frame which one could call grey-gold. It looks just terrific with the Italian red of the body parts and I find it looks cool with yellow too. Red and yellow were the only coulors that you could get for the 916 before later on the Senna special edition was released.
That said, the really cool thing about this paint was that it was flat. I knew the day the first pictures were released that I had to get one. Concerns that it could get greasy, glossy spots over time were unfounded, all the time I owned it, it just looked like when I bought it. Later on when Ducati released updates, e.g. the 996, the frame paint got less goldenish and more glossy which I guess was because of the high costs of the original paint job.
To represent this coulor in the model I used Mr. Paint Anodized Aluminium with some drops of Mr. Paint Brass. All that was covered with a wet coat of Mr. Paint Flat.
Tamiya did a great job in modeling this complex motorbike frame though removing the flash turned out to be quite time consuming. Joins between left and right half were carefully filled and the whole thing received two base coats with some intermediate sanding before the final coats went on.
I'm not entirely unhappy with the result.

2 attached images. Click to enlarge.

Brake disc drilling is not fun! The end result will be worth it though, put some music on and have a beer whilst you do it!

Some news from the workbench.

Frame, rear suspension and engine have been assembled.

I first thought about replacing the steel screws that are used to connect the frame to the engine by some styrene scratch build, but gave up on that idea after a while. The screw connection was just too simple and trustworthy.

The exhausts are pretty much the only part of this model where some weathering can be applied, as the real thing is showing the whole spectrum of colours caused by welding.

The way Tamiya designed this kit, the exhaust parts cannot to be glued together, painted and installed to the bike, I had to paint the parts, bring them on, putty and sand them and paint them again.

All that was kind of nerv-wracking but at the end it all went okay.

4 attached images. Click to enlarge.

Coming along nicely Johannes, the pipes and disc do look good.

Amazing ! Simply amazing. If I didn't know better I would believe this was a full on restoration of the real bike... Looks great my friend. I especially like how the exhaust pipes turned out. The bluing from heat looks spot on. But it's really hard to pick a favorite section of this build. The drilled out / thinned down brake rotors look amazing as well.

That's looking pretty impressive mate!

The year-of-the-cat group build is history almost for a year now and embarrassingly I wasn't able to finish this Italian cat in time.
But hey, I've restarted working on it and there's some heavy sanding and filling going on.
To attach the mirrors Tamiya foresees to glue them right to the cowling without any sort of guiding element which is of course a suicide mission. Added some 0,88 mm styrene rod as a locating pin.

2 attached images. Click to enlarge.

Impeccable Work, Johannes! I miss my Ducati now!