Thanks again gents. It's a hard slog to be sure but its coming together.
I completely agree with Frank - this is really a WNW kit and you have spent years making that match!
Ha! I get a lot of giant match comments, but that is the best one I've heard!
Heres some more progress. The tail codes were a bit of a problem, as there is nothing out there in 1/144 that can be used for them. However I found a screenshot of wingnut wings' decal sheet and was able to reduce it in photoshop and use it as a guide to draw high resolution codes of my own. I printed two of these out. One on white and another on clear decal film. I used a regular domestic laser printer and set it to grayscale and Best quality. It printed out nice and clear even at this size. Maybe this might be useful for larger scale projects too?
Both sheets were brushed with a light coat of satin acrylic clear to seal them. The plain black "85" was put on first and settled in nicely with my favourite Mr Mark Softer. As you can see, I allowed myself plenty of spares!
The next bit was the tricky part. Using a fresh scalpel blade I roughly cut out a nice looking A and 7, leaving a generous margin of space around them. These were soaked off of the backing paper and placed on a dark surface. I then popped my 12x Borg eyepiece in and carefully chopped the excess white away from each of them. This took a number of tries but eventually produced a couple of pairs that I was happy with. Rather amusingly, my head was practically touching the bench as I was doing this. My wife happened to walk past and thought I had nodded off...
Anyway, here's a shot of the finished tail codes. I also managed to get some more rigging in place along the booms and made a start on the control pulleys on the wings.
