Wings of Intent: Scracthbuilt 1/72 scale Travel Air Mystery Ship Shell (second Mystery model on the blog)

(The finished model is here:)
http://wingsofintent.blogspot.com/2013/07/travel-air-mystery-ship-shell-172-scale.html

Dear David finally made a decision on the livery for this one, after some time spent in Lhasa on a diet of snow cookies. So Shell livery it is.
I erased the previous version of this post which was way behind on the blog and I reposted it now adding more images and comments, and will continue to update as I go.
There were five Travel Air Mystery Ships built.

Many went through several paint scheme iterations and a few minor aspect modifications, giving us modelers a pretty wide field of options regarding our personal choices.

I won’t abound here in their story which can be easily found in good publications, the Net, the Akasha Chronicles and your crystal ball.

As I said before, Skyways # 102 April 2013 has an article on the Mystery Ship that will give you a good idea.

I have built as you know a model of Hawks’ RN1313 posted here in 2011, and, enticed by David from Iglooland, I went for another. Since I had the wood masters for the spats and fuselage from the first model the work was not as hard. Having also already figured out the engineering, things went relatively easy.

The possibility of a new livery was a breath of fresh air (I do not particularly like to make the same model twice saved special occasions) and some research and additional work was done to represent it correctly.

Here is as usual the photographic record.

The tail cone was integral pat of the rudder in the original plane, so it was sawed-off :

Metal pins are used to secure the tail feathers (at this step the stab halves were separated), so their locations were drilled:

The tail skid was prepared:

A canopy was vacuformed:

And then two more in decreasing clear plastic thickness, until a good one was obtained:

This specific version of the Mystery Ship at this time has an asymmetrical canopy that granted access to the pilot from the left, here are sketches that show it. The opening is wider at the front due the the conical shape of the fuselage:

Patterns were printed, cut, and then transferred to stiff paper. With them four masks for the wing, four for the horizontal stabilizer, and two for the vertical stabilizer shall be cut.

What is what Michael Ende said?...oh, yes, The Neverending Story.

Yet another wood master is made for the transparency:

And vacuformed part produced:

The former attempts produce adequate results, but this is better

The model is given a few coats of primer:

The never-ending joys of modeling:

The image attached shows -top sheet- what happened when trying to print a normal Arial Black font. It came out as italic (SHELL).

Of course I thought I made a mistake, went back to the file, but all seemed right. Hum. Re-print. Re-screw.
Then of course I tried the usual tricks. Restart, uninstall / re-install font, scream, dance around the printer, kick the computer, hammer stuff around the house, bite neighbors, ask my friend from Malabamba for some (other) decals, etc etc.
After much vain struggle I went online, researched the issue, and sure enough, it is yet another Microsoft "update" screw up that makes that font go berserk. Sigh.
Erase the fonts (both normal and italic versions of it), download new fonts from some site, install, etc.
Problem solved (bellow sheet on photo):

painting begins:

Masking begins. It took a long, long time to apply the hand drawn and cut masks, four for the wing panels, four for the stab, two for the vertical stabilizer, and then the upper fuselage ones, and then blanking the rest: