Nice progress, my friend @gblair! Hope you will find your resin cockpit soon!

Nice work on the landinglight, George @gblair
Would be great if you eventually find this MIA box.

There is a basic cockpit in the model, @lis. At first I planned to simply add some details to the what was in the kit, but the kit parts are really not very good. The floor is not correct, with the pilot's seats sitting directly on the floor, when they should be sitting on a framework which is above the floor. The floor would need to be rebuilt to add the framework. The seats look more like recliners than the real seats, and the seats in the nose for the navigator and bombardier are the same. They should look much different. No side wall details and nothing behind the pilot's seats. Also there is nothing behind the bomb bay, which is where the radio operator sits. For this plane, it is also where the extra equipment and operators are located for the ferret mission, so I wanted to add something there. I can still do the scratchbuilding if I don't find the resin cockpit, but it will just be a lot of work. I may be doing all of this for nothing, because I am not sure much will be visible through the windows anyway. Things you need are always in the last box you look in, so hopefully I will find it today.

I finally found the the resin interior set that I was looking for. It turned out to be a case of good news and bad news. The good news is that it is a really comprehensive set of resin for the B-17F. The set has a huge number of resin parts for almost every compartment in the plane. It also has a nice photoetch set that includes all of the small bits, and the instrument panel and seatbelts.

The first bad news (there is more to come) is that the years the set spent in a hot garage didn't do the parts any favors. All of the small parts were warped, and most of the large parts, especially the ones that were flat and thin, had some really artistic bends in them. I heated up some water and managed to get most of the warps out of the large parts. I was concerned that the smaller parts wouldn't survive the heat treatment, so I am saving them for later.


The next problem with the resin is the instructions. They have some great photos showing how the parts fit to each other, but not one photo that shows how the parts fit in the plane. For instance, the instructions show how to attach the photoetch supports to the pilots' seats, but nothing that shows where the seats go in the cockpit. The larger parts like the floors are supposed to be direct replacements for the kit parts, but I think there is a lot of test fitting in my future, thanks to the warped parts.

There was some surgery to be done on the right side of the fuselage. There are locations for two windows for the gunners imprinted on the inside of the fuselage. Depending on the model of B-17, the gunner's window could be in two places. At first, the windows were back-to-back on the left and right side, but they found that the gunners would bump into each other during combat. The right window was move farther back to deconflict the gunners. I selected the appropriate window imprint, and opened up the window. I kept test fitting the removable window section until everything matched. The second piece of surgery was required because the resin set had a really nice aft crew entrance door, so I had to cut an appropriate size opening in the aft end of the right side of the fuselage. Another round of cut and check for fit.


I got the floor sections for the nose compartment and the flight deck cleaned up and did a lot of test-fitting to be sure they would fit. I used superglue to attach the floor sections to the right side of the plane, and then taped the left side in place to hold everything square until the glue dried. More rounds of prepping the resin, test-fit, and glue are in my future.

Cheers

Great that you found the interior bits, which look very nice, my friend @gblair! Nice save on most of them! I believe you will sort yourself out on which goes where in the model. Nice surgeries, too!
Looking forward to your progress!

Things have really slowed down as I work my way through the many resin parts of the interior set. It continues to be both good and bad news. The parts are definitely better than the kit parts, but the incomplete instructions continue to be a problem. In addition, even with all the extra resin, the compartments will still require some scratch-building to make them look like they should. I keep trying to balance how much detail I want to add against how much you will be able to see in the finished plane.

I can only work on the plane for about an hour at a time. The many small resin parts are interesting to cut off their sprues and then figure out where they are supposed to be. The instructions are more than a little fuzzy in most places, which makes placement a guess in some cases. The photoetch is nice, but is very thick, which makes removing the part from the sheet and cleaning it up a little difficult.

Tomorrow I plan to check some interior photos of the real plane and decide what I want to scratch-build. After that, it will be time to spray a little primer and then start some detail painting. More tomorrow. Cheers.

4 additional images. Click to enlarge.

Great work, George @gblair
Becomes more like a puzzle with the lack of proper instructions.