I am on with this now and am looking forward to getting stuck in with this one. I don't often do 1/48 due to space restrictions. This will be only my third 1/48 since I came back to modelling and my first RN in this scale.
For now the cockpit has been primed and given a once over with black. I'll lightly drybrush this before assembly to make sure all the nooks and crannies that will be unreachable are attended to and then I'll pop on the coloured etch.
Cleaned up all the parts for the next steps which included the wings and wheel wells. Some pin marks needed sorting in the wheel bay.
On inspection of the fuselage there is a small area of mismoulding too which I'll need to sort out.
In preparation for the assembly of the wings I would usually prime and paint the wheel well. The instructions call it out as humbrol 74 'linen', which didn't seem right. I checked the instructions for the wing fold which is usually the same colour and this too is called out as 74. I have never encountered this before as usually war era RN aircraft had these areas in silver and post war were sky grey, so I set about researching it.
Steve kindly sent over an article with snaps of the wheel wells which did indeed show them painted in linen. This aircraft was being restored at Duxford.
Confusingly though the oleos appear sky grey. In other examples the oleos appear to be plain sky!.
Google shows the wheel wells for the operational Duxford aircraft in linen too. I suspect this is the restored version from above.
I dug deep in the internet and found somebodies walkaround from 2007 of the specific aircraft I am building (VR930), which at first seemed inconclusive. What you can say is it's not linen, but it's not clear from this if it's silver or sky grey.
A different angle though shows greater contrast to the sky underside and a non-metallic finish.
In conclusion, it appears that the linen is correct for a metal finish aircraft. Aircraft in post war service colours is as I suspected, sky grey.
Seems like a lot of effort to arrive at a conclusion I knew instinctively. The question is why
Airfix didn't do this and get it right!
Anyway. Now that I have the answer I can review any scratching I think might be worth adding to the wheel wells, pre paint them and get the fuselage closed up.