I have been continuing to add more scratch built detail to the cockpit. Putty, brass and copper.
I seem to be slowly replacing the original grey plastic piece by piece.
I have been focusing on the middle console. Firstly adding two boxes one on either side of the console, I assume they are hard drives or something to do with the monitors. I cut out square holes on either side then added a thin metal cover made from brass sheet. The boxes themselves were made from spare styrene and a few brass details were added. I then drilled a hole for wiring and then glued them into place. I made some straps for the wiring using brass tubing and attached them to the console leading around behind the gunners seat. The wire was then threaded through and attached to the boxes.
The space behind the gunners seat I added a bracket with a seat adjusting dial and a hydraulic tube.
From there I moved on to the arm rests.
There was one arm rest for the pilot but the gunners one was missing. I decided to add one using Tamiya epoxy putty and replace the pilots one at the same time to keep them consistent. To make the seats I squared up some putty and cut out the basic shapes. I scored three lines down the middle and then pinched the edges with some flat tweezers to simulate the sown edges.
They ended up a little asymmetrical, which is good because that's the way the cushions look in real life too.
Most of the wires and cabling were left until nearer the end because they would have gotten in the way and I wanted to do them all together. Most of them are located on the pilots left side.
I added twisted wire and thicker copper wire to the ports that I previously installed in various places.
In the actual cockpit you can see bundles of wires that are usually white in color bound together using cable ties. To make these I straitened out some thick twisted wire to give me individual threads, then tied them at intervals using 0.3 mm copper wire to simulate the cable ties. I added two of these to the model in the left corner.
Another cable crammed into that upper left corner is looped around a couple of times then it go's into a censor in the ceiling. I also added a couple of clasps for it to hang on a panel.
That is about all I can do in the cockpit at the moment, the parts with photo etch panels will have to be painted before instillation. Foe now I will move on to making up the target sight system censor dome at the front of the nose.
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