I've been working on the cockpit for the past couple of days. Funny how much easier it is when you are not dealing with photoetch or resin! The instrument panel could use an upgrade though. The instrument bezels are ridiculously overscale, which shrinks the instrument faces to the point of making it impossible to add any details or decals into the smaller gauges.
I punched out instrument decals from my spares box to fill the bigger instruments but even the big ones were teeny...
I did the best that I could and will call the IP done after a flat coat and putting a drop of Future into each of the instrument faces. The instrument panels on Focke-Wulfs are set well back into the fuselage and will be hard to see anyway.
The cockpit floor and seat bulkhead was painted RLM66 over a black base. Various raised features were painted in a lighter grey for contrast. The paint was sealed with a gloss coat and then a dark wash was run through all of the details. The wash was sealed with a flat coat and then I did some weathering using colored pencils and some earth-colored pastel chalk dust.
I scrounged up some PE seatbelts from the spares box. I also replaced the kit foot pedals with the photoetched ones that came with the Ju88 detail set.
The left console was missing a part of the wall per some archive pictures of Ta152 cockpits. I added a wiring harness from underneath the panel to fill up that empty space.
Both consoles were painted in RLM66 and instrument bases were painted black. Details were picked out with a fine brush using red, yellow and white. The throttle was painted yellow.
Ok... I think the cockpit is finished.
The assembly now jumps into the area in front of the cockpit including the engine. I'm not planning on having the engine viewable so I'm not going to spend oodles of time painting and detailing these next few steps.