I've made a start on the cockpit and just about ready to assemble it into the fuselage.
The resin cockpit is designed for the Kinetic kit and is a little short for the Hasegawa kit.
The fourth photo shows the cut I had to make to remove the cockpit coamings.
The cockpit tub comes in two main parts - front and rear - and you can see the huge pour stubs on the edge of the photo.
Side walls are provided separately with the right side including the arm rests in the retracted position.
The F-16 uses a side-stick control that doesn't move. Instead transducers detect the force applied by the pilot and translate that to pitch and roll commands. For comfort, the pilot is provided with two arm rests for his right arm.
The throttle control on the left does move conventionally, however.
The resin cockpit doesn't come with either joystick or throttle so I had to trim the kit parts to fit. Neither look like the real thing with the throttle being an odd ball shape. This is probably because the kit is also designed to allow the supplied crew to be placed in the cockpit with hands on stick and throttle.
I also had to use the kit rudder pedals.
I needed to remove a portion of the lower fuselage to accommodate the rear cockpit, as can be seen in the first photo . I intend to make a FOD cover for the intake, so the underside of the cockpit won't be seen when finished.
I have yet to cut the pour gates off the ejection seats and you can see how large they are.
My friend Les lent me an excellent reference on the F-16, "F-16 Fighting Falcon: Flying in Air Forces around the World: by Duke Hawkins.
It includes pics of F-16Fs, although not of their cockpit, and I've used the older model cockpit photos as references for my painting.
I'll also use it as a reference to detail the rather sparse wheel wells.
4 attached images. Click to enlarge.
