Work In Progress

No heresy, the Airfix kit is a good kit for those who are in a position to spend more.

There is also a Wolfpack release of the Academy PBY-5 (pure flying boat version) in RAF colours from a few years ago https://www.scalemates.com/kits/wolfpack-wp17208-raf-catalina-i-bismarck--1315145

strewth, if some of the erks were applying invasion stripes while the aircraft were in flight then it's no wonder some of them were a bit wobbly

obviously, why else would they make the tooling unnecessarily complicated and expensive? as a rule of thumb the cost of bringing a new injection moulded kit to market is proportionate to the number of parts

Interchangeable noses and tails: excellent news

I've pre-ordered both boxings: for some reason "Volume 1" was £21.87 whereas "Volume 2" was £23.67, so an average of £22.87 which I thought was pretty good given the decals. I have another two Fujimi releases already from decades ago, no idea what I paid for them except that I had a lot more hair back then. I will definitely use up the new Cartograph decals on the four.

Looks to me to be perfectly neutral, faired in line with the rest of the trailing edge, Also, it doesn't have a camo demarcation line across it as the mating wing skin suggests it should

or you could paint it in one of the many other perfectly acceptable and viable ways. I've literally never used a canopy mask set and I am only a very average modeller but have no trouble getting decent results with a bit of brushwork practice and in some cases the use of slices of pre-painted decal strip

This might be true in the Bahamas but certainly not in the UK, where right now you can pre-order the Hobby 2000 kit for £21.87 from Hannants (and I am sure several other places). The many Fujimi Spey Phantoms currently available to eBay buyers in the UK are all priced at between about £22 at the bottom end and over £40 at the top end, with the cost of aftermarket decals on top. So in the UK at least the second-hand route is very much not the low cost way to go

As you say, the Heller Stampe does indeed have its shape problems, the kit being based not on a standard SV4 but on a modified one-off aircraft with a reduced-span lower wing. That said, making it into a Blue Max fighter is an excellent idea and you've made a lovely job of it. I look forward to the Tiger Moth!

What's going on with the port aileron in that pic? Doesn't look bright enough to be the same colour as the wing root patch, rear fuselage and tail

Only if they bring out some new wings without the sawtooth. As flown in the blue stripe over red scheme as G-HUNT by Spencer Flack the aeroplane had a straight leading edge. It seems to have been retrofitted some time after Spencer's ownership. It was, as an F.51, a Danish export equivalent of the F.4, small-bore Avon, so you would need a new fuselage too (or rear fuselage perhaps, I don't have the Airfix kit so don't know whether they have tooled it with all the different rear ends in mind) EDIT Ahh, just checked Scalemates and I find they HAVE in fact done an F.4 boxing as well as the familiar F.6 and FGA.9, For some reason I have never seen or heard of the F.4 kit before, so it seems a no-brainer in that case. Must see if I can pick one of those up

Exactly! This was an RAF one out of RAF Gutersloh. Having seen them in magazines I had a general mental model of them being sort of Huey-class, and I suppose it is, but very differently arranged. The pilot let me sit in the cockpit after our flight and it was like mountaineering getting up there

That's a really effective presentation, a great choice of paint scheme to draw attention and show off the airframe. One of the few helicopters I flew in as a cadet, I remember being quite taken aback by the sheer height of the machine, with the cockpit being the "upstairs flat"!

It's properly exciting, that! Very interested in a kit, if you decide to make them available