Thankyou all for your kind comments, I'm pleased your enjoying the build thread as much as I am building the model.

Finishing off the nose retract. This required a cut out for in the belly pan. Another job for the tempory belly pan I made. You will notice the masking tape stuck around the nosewheel cut out. This was where I cut too much off the belly pan, the masking tape are the final cut lines.
Just as well I didn't go ahead and work directly on the kit supplied belly pan, as the nose wheel with my model is 1/4 " to one side where the original kit should have been. The reason for the offset nosewheel in the kit, was to miss the manifold for the 2 stroke 60 engines.

Next to finish off the cockpit. The canopy was roughly cut to size with a dremel drill and cutting wheel. If you cut the cockpit with scissors, it will simply crack the plastic.
To help contour the cockpit canopy to the fuselage, rough sandpaper is wrapped around the fuselage, with the canopy slid back and fourth. Becareful here, if you get carried away as I did, the sandpaper can sratch the canaopy in places you dont want. Nothing too serious lucky for me.
The cockpit floor is made up from 1/16" balsa, one neet trick I learned from BOOTALINI ( Jeff's ) electric Aurora, was to let the cockpit into the fuselage. Our trusty freind Mr Dermel was once used to carve a shallow groove into the fuselage using a abrasive disc wheel.

A couple of coates of sanding sealer, sanded in between helps the dope to adhear to the balsa fuselage. Light weight tissue was used for the covering, along with a couple more coates of thinned dope, finishing off with a light spray of cellulose grey paint.

While on the subject on paint, I'm pondering on how to finish the model off. My previous pattonships utilised a painted fuselage with filmed wings / tail ie oracover. For the this subject I was thinking of covering the fueslage in lightweight glass cloth 20g / m2, the wings and tail with light weight tissue and dope. For the paint, cellulose with a 2 pack clear coat to fuel proof.

Would just using 2 pack as the final colours be a lighter finish than cellulose paint, then a 2 pack fuel proofer ? I welcome your comments.

Mike.