Tonight I’ve added the cockpit sides. The manual is a bit vague about this part and you have to cut your own parts for this, but it ain’t difficult:

Adding the cockpit sides makes a lot of difference. The canopy fits well, looking way better right now:

Until now, there’s only one thing I wasn’t happy with: the rudder hinge line. In an attempt to approximate the scale hinge line, I carved it in an arc instead of in a straight line, as the manual suggests. But the arc was too sharp and it just didn’t look right, so I glued on a piece of 3/32 balsa sheeting and carved a new hinge line (you can clearly see the difference between the new and the old line):

Then, I sanded the rudder to fit the new shape of the fin trailing edge; this made all the difference!

The next step was to glue on the cockpit fairings. I made the fairing formers and the fairings themselves yesterday (as you have to cut and shape these parts from scrap balsa yourself) and after two takes I got a nice pair of well fitting formers:

Lastly, I glued on the fairings and started blending them with the upper fuse sheeting. It still needs some more filler, but I’m almost there:

Couldn’t resist weighing the result so far… it feels quite light and although this number doesn’t say anything at all right now, it’s nice to see such a big assembly is only weighing 340 grams as per now: