Thanks folks! To answer some of the questions -
PrzemoL - The internal frame is not quite to scale - it is a little reduced in terms of width to fit inside the fuselage, mainly to fit around the "shoulders" of the interior, as can be seen in the photo below. The resin fuselage is actually quite well cast and reasonably thin, despite a few mould flaws and some air bubbles (indeed the flying surfaces are also replicated nicely - you can see a wing below (I removed the aileron, which was tricky as the resin is quite hard)). The framing is still wide enough to comfortably fit the seat, so to me that is always a reasonable mark of whether the interior is roughly "to scale".
Bud - I think in fact that the Blue Max kit might be easier, as I think Blue Max mould the wings and upper decking as one piece? The only negatives with the Blue Max kits tends to be that their wings are quite thick at the trailing edge. The Spin kit has some nice thin trailing edges, thankfully! Yep I really like the detail in the vector engine.... Alas there will be some damage to the rocker arms as the cowling is already quite thin, but I have a semi-cunning plan in mind to possibly address this... not sure if it will work out yet. Ideally, I would have trimmed the bottom of the cylinders before I glued them in, but in my usual careless way I just jumped straight in without thinking!
Gregory - the frame is all eye-balled, that is, I didn't use a jig. What I did was to make both "side wall" frames first, making sure they matched up, and then added the span-wise cross-members (which are all the same length). Some fiddling was required to get the right length of the cross-members so that they didn't buckle when the fuselage halves went together. The fit is now snug, but it doesn't bend the frame.
Des - many thanks! I actually used your build of the Alley Cat kit as a reference for the internal framing (don't tell anyone
)... beautiful build you did there too. That's what I love about the M1C, so many cool schemes to choose from!
Cheers,
BC
