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Hi, I finally finished my Kittyhawk F-86D, painted with Texas ANG markings. The build is OOB, with the only addition being the fabric seatbelts from Eduard/HGW. I started it in August during my hollydays, but i only cut, cleaned and glued small asemblies at this time as i was not home. I started painting and assembling it only in late august. It was not so long as i build another small model since then, so it took me about 2 months in all, but i did not worked on it every days. It was first primed in grey, sanded smooth and coated with Alclad gloss black. Then i polished it a lot with micromesh 12000 grit and applied a mix of AK chrome and polished aluminium. Compared with the Alclad hi shine finishes, the AK are a bit less reflective, but still quite good, though they are way stronger to adhesive tape and various manipulations. I used the stencils and emblems from the box, but most of the markings (ANG markings, stars-n-bars and also the walking area border) were painted with masks as i found the large decals from the box quite tricky to use and the national insigna blue was too light. Anyway, it's always better to paint on a NMF model as you avoid any carrier film, difficult to blend in when you cannot use any varnish coat (it would kill the sheen and the reflection). There has been a lot of masking for the dayglo orange surfaces, the suface traitement on some aluminium parts, exhaust area, and markings, but i'm quite happy with this original and colorful scheme. The weathering was quite light as on this kind of polished finish, there is not a lot to do. A just hi lighted the panels with a UMP wash (no enamel wash as the AK metal paints are enamels so i did not want to experiment something that could ruin everything !), as without it it looks a bit toyish (i mean when you can see the bottom of the panel lines painted on...). On the dayglo areas, i did not used "dark dirt" was as it would be too dark and would be unrealistic, so i used "rust" color instead. The build itself was not the easiest i did, but it was quite pleasent. Nothing was really difficult to solve, though it sometimes asked for a bit of thinking and a lot of trimming. Of course, some putty was involved, too. I have two other of the kind in the stash (F-86K, which i plan to build as a french and a german aircraft) and i think it will be easier next time now that i trained myself on this one. I hope you like it. As usual, i took indoor pictures (but with daylight) on a blue background (i prefer that that the usual white background wich is too agessive for the other colors, though my blue is too vivid. I should find a kind of neutral grey background...) and then full outdoor pictures. Here is the link to the WIP thread : http://forum.largescaleplanes.com/index.php?showtopic=64229