8/18/2023 0 Comments Landinding a p51 cockpit view![]() ![]() I used the punch/die set to punch out a couple of discs of masking tape which I laid over the bezels to keep them from being painted over. The dry-transfer faces were applied and the bezels set in place and glued (I used a very small dab of watch crystal cement to hold the bezels in place because experience has shown me that with parts this small, as soon as I touched the needle with the superglue on it, the small part would stick to it the watch crystal cement worked perfectly to hold the bezel in place while capillary action moved the superglue from the needle to between the bezel and the floor) (yes…I actually glued something in place so I could glue something in place): And then I discovered I couldn’t use the acetate faces so those depressions had to be filled in with styrene: To use the acetate gauge faces I had to drill a depression for the faces to fit into. I used the PE bezels for that determination. Once I found what I needed, I also needed to make sure that they were of the proper diameter. All I needed were two basic “quantity” gauge faces (a needle pointing to the left and a series of marks arcing across the top of the face). Once I was done with my (useless but satisfying) invective, I remembered I had a lot of dry-transfer gauge faces in my armor parts stash. Instead, about 75% of the face was separated, but the remaining 25% caused the face to curve inside the die and the punch scraped the instrument detail off. There is just enough slop in the punch/die set for the gauge face to not punch cleanly through. An insurmountable problem developed when I used the punch/die set to punch out the gauge faces. The acetate sheet that came with the PE set also had the fuel tank gauges. I decided that while I was doing gauges, I would also do the main wing tanks gauges, which are set into the floor. I used the watch crystal cement to attach the acetate gauges and superglue to bond the instrument panel’s surround to the panel proper, and then painted the toggle switch bats: If I want the gauge details to show (AND I DO), they need to be painted white, so I covered the areas of the faces from behind with white paint. The areas of the gauges faces that aren’t black are clear. Once the panel was painted, I used a white colored pencil to VERY lightly add highlights to the upper edges of the instrument bezels. With that done, I mixed flat black (75%) with gloss white (25%) to achieve scale color representation. Easy to not put something there, but I also had to plug the holes where the toggles go as well as trim down the switch panel itself, then to add the wire to replicate the bats of the toggle switches. Those three toggles are the “master arm” switch and one toggle each to arm the nose and tail fuses of bombs. I’ve already removed the salvo controls (those things that transform something being carried to something being dropped) but there are three toggle switches that have to come off the panel itself. One of the (many) interesting features of the P-51 was that it had no hard-points under the wings from which to hang bombs or drop tanks. The PE set had a two-piece panel that nicely replicated the original’s panel, it would just some tweaking (and as it turned out, fitting) to work. The P-51 panel has an inner panel that isn’t really attached to the surround (there are brackets behind the actual panel that it mounts to). The PE set has a very nice photo-etched panel with a sheet of gauge faces printed on what I suspect is acetate and that’s the route I decided to take. I could have thinned out the sides of the cockpit where the panel mounts, but that would have left me with extremely thin plastic and I didn’t want to go there. I estimate that I was about six scale inches short of the space I needed to be able to use a scratch-built instrument panel. And though I got a decent start with it, what I ended up with would not work. My original intention was to scratch-build the instrument panel from sheet styrene and the Waldron instrument faces.
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