Well, I started out with good intentions until life and work and winter got in the way. But I finally got to a point where my other two projects are at a standstill, so I got started on this one.
As usual, work starts in the cockpit and for this one I got the Eduard zoom photoetch set. That turned out to be a good choice because the kit cockpit, while not bad, is a little sparse. This is my first foray into P/E for an entire cockpit, so it's been a bit of a learning curve. The main instrument panel is two pieces, one with the instruments and the overlay that gives the 3-d effect. The instruments were superglued to the kit part after filing the raised detail off, but I was a little leery of using CA to attach the overlay. I wanted a little more time to tweak the overlay and I didn't want the glue fogging the instrument faces, so I took a shot and used Future to secure it. That worked just fine, so I did the same for all the other panels except for the ones on the fuselage sides, as they had to be curved slightly to fit and the Future just wouldn't hold them in place. I'll tackle the seat harness next, which should be interesting as the P/E set was for the USAF version and has parts the Navy did not use. The only problem so far is that none of the colors on the P/E parts match any of the paint I used on the plastic. So it will be a well worn cockpit with some replacement parts. That's my story and I'm sticking to it...
As they say, this is close enough for government work and I'm happy with it so far...
Stay tuned...
2 attached images. Click to enlarge.
