This evening I tackled the details behind the cockpit. Hasegawa had provided a moulded sliding canopy track but this never survived the seam smoothing operations. There are also several plates and brackets missing and so I decided to add these. So I turned on Andy Donnelly's Celtic Show in CKUA to get me in the right frame of mind and hopped to it.
This first pic as already a couple of steps into the process as I neglected to take pics of the how I got here. The first step was to add a long rectangular plate behind the seat belt bar on the forward side. This plate bolted to the upper fuselage surface via triangular brackets on each side. There was also a central bracket attaching the head armour. These were made of very thin styrene sheet and glued in place with CA. You can just make them out in white in the pic. Before all that, I cut the sliding hood from the sprue and traced the outside of the closed position to get me oriented for the stuff that needed to be added. Inside of that outline, I pencilled in the shape of the raised strip that formed the seal for the closed hood.
Next, I cut two very thin strips of styrene and glued them in place to form the track. Then using stretched sprue, I added the seal strip along the pencilled outline.
Here's the plate that I added to the front with masking tape in place for the paint overspray.
Et voila, the finished details painted in Rubber-Night-Coal Dust-Silhouette-Deep Pool Black (in case Terry and Karl want to know the shade).
Though the track itself will be painted with the camouflage colours, I sprayed the black over it to make sure that the slot was good and dark
It just occurred to me that the cylindrical object on the back of the head armour might not be correct and, sure enough, it seems Hardy's bird did not have this so I'll need to lop it off and retouch the paint there.
Thanks for looking in again.