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Landing gear done. Somewhat complex, questionable engineering (yup, let's glue three rod-ish pieces together end to end to just make one long piece, that makes sense) and quite poorly cast by the standards of the kit overall. What saves it all form being a complete nightmare is that the main legs are each one hefty piece sitting butt-one against the underside of the wing inside the wheel bay. So I pinned that with 0.8mm piano wire and so the actual structure to hold the aircraft up should be as solid as it gets (just make sure to trim them suitably first so the plane sits at least approximately level) and all the other struts can just hang around and be decorative around that.
The main wheels have been sanded quite flat underneath, not something I usually do but getting rid of the casting blocks made it somewhat inevitable. So that meant getting the rear wheel on before the main wheels so I could see where exactly to align the flat spot and, oh, it snapped off. Luckily the air bubble inside that made it snap was quite well centred and so it helped centre the drill bit for pinning that as well, though only 0.4mm brass there. Pegs on the main legs for the wheels were too long, quite a bit too fat for the holes in the PE inner wheel hubs, and the wheels themselves had no holes for them at all.
On the plus side, since absolutely nothing here fits straight away you're never caught by surprise, you naturally test fit absolutely everything to see how it wont fit with everything else around it. It's an honest kit like that.
Next up, the assuredly absolutely wonderful task of masking the greenhouse style nose and canopy, two somewhat weakly and vaguely detailed vacuform pieces... Feel free to open a betting pool on whether or not I remember to glue in the nose chair (kept out so far since it'd be at a major risk of getting knocked off) before I glue on the nose. Though given the clarity of said nose you probably won't be able to see if I do or not.
