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With a week off, I've been making the most of time at home and started on the latest build. I've had the Aeroclub engines for a while now, but just got round to putting them to good use. Having been inspired by the excellent Merrick book - Halifax 'From Hell to Victory & Beyond', I thought I would do HR686 which was tragically lost after being hit by gun fire from the ship Amisia which ironically is the ship that rescued the survivors. You can find out more about the fateful mission HERE. I've started with the conversion bits to get the hard stuff out of the way. The Aeroclub engines are nicely shaped, but not shake & bake. The beautifully formed resin radiator intakes are a couple of mm narrower than the nacelles at the top rear, so some sanding and filling is necessary. As such, I've had to rescribe the panel lines, but they are a good fit to the wing. Given this aircraft will be white rather than black, imperfections will be more visible, so I'm spending plenty of time getting the nacelles smooth. I've added new radiator doors underneath out of plasticard due to the zealous sanding and used the Quickboost carb intakes on the sides of each nacelle. It's taken a day of fettling to get them to this point, but look at the photo's next to the kit parts and make your own mind up whether it's worth it, I'm happy about the replacements. I've had to scrape away the nacelle interior at the front to allow the undercarriage mounts to fit, but this was fairly straight forwards. Aeroclub provide modified front & rear bulkheads due to the new nacelles being narrower than the kit parts, but you can trim the kit bulkheads down as another option. The undercarriage assembly doesn't need any modifications, it will drop straight in. I've ordered some replacement Quickboost exhausts although the kit parts aren't too bad. Given the individual fitments of this aircraft, Freightdog provide the parts necessary - Tollerton nose (which is available too in the Mk.III kit) and the raised fairing. The mid upper turret on this aircraft is a BP Type A Mk.VIII left over from Defiant production and sat slightly higher than the later Type E resulting in more drag. It also had the shroud fitted, again supplied by Freightdog...