Joe;
That one was so long ago I don't recall what plane it even was. Out of my over 35 years as a machinist about 23 of them were spent as a model maker. I worked on a pile of them. I don't even remember if that one was made of aluminum or stainless steel, we made a lot of both. Made a couple of fuselages out of Nickel. The dark spots you see on the wings are epoxy. The epoxy is covering up slots where stainless tubes were run for pressure taps on the wing's surface. Detail is not sharp enough to see them but the far side had the pressure taps on top & the near side on the bottom. These were usually around 1/16" OD tubes, though the size was not always the same. The tubes are all routed out that big tube projecting from the rear.
A lot of the time getting all the tubes installed & Working, was more difficult than building the model itself.
One little interesting tidbit, on one occasion I was working on a highly classified project. We were locked up in a room & working 2 shifts around the clock 12 hrs each shift. I had it from 5 pm to 5 am. One evening one of the others who was working it with me had stopped at WalMart on the way to work. He brought in a little box with a plastic Mattel model in it. It was a Dead Ringer for that Top Secret model we were working on.
