Made some more progress.
Scratch built the bombardier's panel from plasticard. The length is only 7.5mm. I then brush painted the whole panel with Floquil grimy black, a very dark grey with a very subtle brown hue, the same color I used on the bombsight. I find this color to look better in scale rather than straight flat black. It also allows for contrast, as will be seen further down, when used in conjunction with flat black to add variation and depth.
Before continuing, I have a mini tutorial on a technique I used. I needed to make very tiny circles to represent some gauges on the bombardier's panel. This is what I came up with.
Using the blunt end of a hypodermic needle...
Press the end into a thin smear of oil paint, white in this case.
It should coat just the ring of the end, no paint should be inside the needle or this will not work properly.
Use this as a stamp to make a near perfect circle, demonstrated here on an old splotch of gun metal paint on some sheet styrene. Be care to only press straight down and not to drag the needle as oil paint smears very easily.
The picture I used for reference.
Here is what I achieved.
The panel on the upper right is a 3mm x 3mm piece of aluminum painted flat black. I tried adding sectioning lines to the panel according to references by pressing my xacto blade on the panel and dragging slightly the length of th blade to have the aluminum show through as lines. I had mediocre success, and they don't show up much in the picture. The other details were added with a fine brush and white oil paint. The red safety cover is gloss red acrylic.
The intervelometer panel at the bottom of the panel is a piece of plasticard cut to size and painted flat black. Details were made with the stamping technique and a fine brush. The details on the upper left of the panel are again made by stamping and a fine brush. The two lower instruments though were made using copper wire rings glued to the surface with dots of flat black paint. The bezels were then carefully drybrushed with white oil paint.
Also, I started reworking the floor for the navigator/bombardier stations.
I scribed a line down the center to represent the plywood floor panels in the navigator's station. For the forward nose area, notice I have removed the white plasticard ring I had in place earlier, as further research revealed what I was trying to achieve was actually very different. Instead, I removed the chin turret from below. It is held in place by a plastic pin that inserts into the grey bushing shown here. Before the aluminum and copper details were added to the bushing, it was a ring with a hole going all the way through. I inserted the turret upside down and used it as a template for the round plywood floor panel here. I carefully ran my xacto blade around its circumference until a perfect circle had been scribed into the floor. The turret was removed and the circle was further cleaned up with the xacto and tamiya extra thin cement to take care of any burrs. The bushing will represent the electric drive unit for the chin turret. More details and wiring will be added soon.
Hope you like it so far. One piece at a time, she is coming together, albeit slowly.
Chad