Before putting the wings together I prepared the radiator parts per the instructions provided with the RB Productions radiator etch. This was very straightforward. After painting the components black I then "glued" the etches to the plastic using Future.
After installing the radiators I installed the two wing landing lights inserting a piece of silver foil in to the clear part and fixing it in place with future.The clear part was then protected with some Liquid Mask. Gluing the wings together was again straightforward the fit of the parts is good. One important thing to do was to pre-paint the inside of the radiator intakes and clamp everything around the radiators to ensure good alignment.
You can see in the photograph here I also painted the inside of the wing structure white which is consistent with my references.
At this point I embarked on creating representations of the fuselage tapes and wing strengthening that can be seen in photographs but is absent from the model. If you have The De Haviland Mosquito. A comprehensive guide for the modeller - Richard A Franks, book the position of the tapes is shown in the 1/48 drawings at the rear of the book.
Following the technique described by Steve Abbey in Airfix Model World #5 I taped off the seams along the fuselage center lines, around the rear of the wings and the wing strengtheners with Tamiya masking tape. I then proceeded to fill in the area between the tape with successive layers of Mr Surfacer 1200. After about 6 coats the level of the filler was just proud of the tape edges.
Next step was to sand down the filler level with the tape. On the fuselage this was easily achieved using my Flex-I-File. The wing strengtheners I did mainly with sanding sticks.
The wing and fuselage assemblies were now ready to be joined together. The fit is very good and results in the largest model to ever sit on my workbench and it's only about 30% done. Maneuvering this around is going to be tricky.
