I stretched some sprue to make the rods, they are a little out of scale but I think they add necessary detail to the engine. I also used bits of sprue for the rocker arms. I painted the main body of the engine flat black and the rods titanium white. Acrylics are translucent, so the black undercoating dulls down the silver while the white makes the silver pop more. I dry brushed silver over the cooling fins of the cylinders to bring out detail. I also dry brushed Titanium white on the rods at the very last (after this pic was taken) and did some washes on the engine. I wanted three layers of paint to create depth. Bright silver, dull silver, and black with silver highlights, which is the basic pattern on the real engine.
The pilots seat should have been a leather bucket type of seat, but the kit gives you a square seat, so I rounded the corners off seat and rounded all of the edges. In the black and white picture, I really couldn't tell whether the leather was black or brown, so I painted mine a really dark brown.
The wing ribs seemed out of scale, so I sanded them down to make them less pronounced and the wing thinner. I am trying some Testors sculpting putty to fill in the pin marks.
The fit is pretty good for the kit, but there is some flash to clean up. Here I've used PPP to fill in the gaps on the bottom of the fuselage. I also used it all around the engine cowling. I also painted the prop, trying for a laminated effect. I will add a gloss coating later to simulate the varnish they used on the props. The period pics seem to show black props, but the modern pics show laminated wood. I like the laminated look better, so I went with that.
Next I will paint the cowling black and then put silver over it and construct the landing gear and the tail area.
