Great work, John (@johnb) and Spiros (@fiveten). I turned my head for one second and you both have raced ahead. I am still amazed at how much unexpected time-killing stuff comes up during this time of the year. My wife's birthday is the 17th, and our anniversary is the 31st, and of course, Christmas is the 25th. We are also going to the WW2 Museum in New Orleans, next week, so not much modeling then. I want to get this 104 and the Wellesley done by the end of the year.
I started working on the cockpit today. It is fairly sparse, but the canopy is in one piece, so I don't think much will be needed. I added some half-round plastic to the left side of the cockpit to stand in for the throttle quadrant. I will add a throttle later. I cut the casting plug off the bottom of the resin seat I got for this model. The seat looks like it might be too tall for the model, but I can figure that out once I add the cockpit to the fuselage. I have photos of the ejection seat that shows that some were black and some were gray. A little more research needed. The instrument panel seems to have a slightly wrong shape, so I sanded the top down and added some plastic to create something a little closer to the actual plane. The instrument panel shroud is very thick, so I used a Dremel to thin the walls of the shroud so that it can accept the new part of the instrument panel. I painted the inside of the fuselage gray to get it ready for adding the cockpit. Hopefully more tomorrow. Cheers.
5 attached images. Click to enlarge.
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1. Italieri's effort to kept the tip of the nose intact. Worked well.
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1. Kit has two different seats.
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1. Instrument panel shroud has very thick walls. I will thin them down with my Dremel.
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1. New instrument panel portion added. The kit part was more narrow, probably so it would fit between the thick walls of the panel shroud.
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1. I used black primer on the new resin seat. Even if I go with gray for the color, this will provide a good base color.
