Two more shots in better lighting after some cleaning up of the initial reprofiling job reveal that it actually wasn't a bad first shot at things:
Extending the sail slightly to form the correct profile means that the raised detail of the deck safety line attachment rails has to go, but this is not a disaster as I intended to replace that with fine wire anyway, I think that will look much more convincing than the original molded on detail. Most of the other raised details, such as the oversized square hatch detailing is going to be going too, it would be much better represented simply by masking and painting it in at this scale, so that's what I intend to do.
One advantage doing this 'nose job' on the sail will confer, is that it will be easier to add the SOKS wake detection array to the front of the sail. There is no attempt to model this in the original kit, which is not surprising as it would be fairly tricky to do in plastic at this scale. Even so, it is very noticeable on most shots of the Akula, so I'm going to add it. Currently I'm thinking that the heads of either dressmaking pins or sewing needles inserted into the putty which forms the reprofiled sail front will make a pretty good lookalike, but in case that isn't as good as it sounds, I bought some very fine steel rods from a model shop the other day as a back up solution. I took the precation of filling the inside of the sail with modeling putty too, as all this sanding might end up making the sail's original plastic rather thinner than it was to start off with, and the tip of the sail where it nears the cockpit location has had quite a lot of plastic shaved off, so it will definitely be getting on the thin side at that point.
Had an email from Flagship Models yesterday too, letting me know that the replacement screw set I ordered has been posted, so that's good news. Since I will be displaying the completed model in a rather unusual way (watch this space!) which calls for the creeper motors to be in their retracted position, this gets around the problem of their two tiny screws having to be either corrected or replaced. Even with the close up photographs of these in Wayne Frey's book, I suspect they would be more guesswork that a true depiction of the real things as the casings and support stanchions don't look too accurate in the kit compared to the (few) pics you can get which show them for real, besides which, the screws for the creeper motors appear to be behind some sort of protective grille on the real deal, which I daresay would be impossible to emulate at this scale in any really convincing fashion, so I'm glad this is not going to be an issue. Shame you can't get those creeper motors on the 'Akula' in Dangerous Waters, that would be really cool!
Chock