Night Swallow's night fighting double cockpit

A two-person tub

My best understanding about any of the WWII plane cockpits came from flight simulators, the one with the most hours was a slightly ageing European Air War, while IL-2 Sturmovik was a bit fresher, but I hadn't touched that one in something like 15+ years now. Luckily the wonderful world of the interwebs contained reference images such as this one here:

SRC: https://airandspace.si.edu/multimedia-gallery/image/web10866-2008hjpg

There was no way I'd get that hysterically close even if I did my bestestest. This photo helped me to figure out what all that crap in the cockpit was, and that was valuable in deciphering the instructions.

The pilot's workstation

In the two-person cockpit the frontmost was the pilot's place and that was where the adventure started.

Assembling the front seat

Having very little clue of anything I didn't try to optimize prematurely, and instead I followed the instructions as obediently as one could. An airplane model started from the cockpit, that this time wasn't a simple tub with a couple of tiny flakes glued into it, but it was a couple of separate plates. These first pieces became the arm consoles of the pilot and the sides between which the pilot sat. Well, I knew that the throttle controls lived on the left side, and if I remembered correctly the landing gear toggle was somewhere front left. This construction was glued into a wall, and I assumed the bit behind the pilot's butt was a battery. At least it looked like a battery to me.

The floor piece got a bar for the rudder, and the pilot's joystick. This also got glued into the back wall with a pretty tiny grabbing surface but I trusted it would become sturdier as the build progressed.

The foot pedals sat nicely on their cradle, and they looked pretty nice to my amateur eyes.

This pedal setup also fell in place pretty conveniently, so I could proceed to install the instrument panel parts in place. Now I was in a place where I had to seriously consider picking up the paints if I wanted to fit inside the model with my paintbrush. Maybe I had already passed that point from a airplane-dedicated hobbyis't viewpoint but I didn't know how to be the most efficient here.

I still had no dedicated weights to add into the nose, I remembered seeing that while skimming through the instructinos. I felt mad enough to consider pulling some cables or wires from the back of the IP to also add some little extra weight. The risk was that I'd stupidly do something I felt like instead of doing it correctly. Perhaps that was a silly detail to be left for the serious and dedicated ones.

While playing with these loose bits I was concerned with the positioning and alignment: if something was a degree off, the whole shebang would be wrong when sealing this setup into the plane's hull. After taking this last photo I glued the assembled subassembly into its front wall. If my memory served, that was the wall between a fuel tank and the guns.

Weirdly early painting

Now I was in a stage where I had to start painting if I wanted to reach almost everything. Or like I thought before, I may have already gone past that moment, simply being unused to planes. I got my paintbrush and coated most of what I had built in a dark grey paint (VMA 71055 Black Grey RLM66). Instead of using the metallic paint that the instructions were pushing I drybrushed this with Cold Grey (VGA 72750 Cold Grey). On the surfaces I followed the guidance and shades as I could, only Anthrazite was something I didn't own so the front right panel was a bit different.

The most colour variety came for the joystick's base and the throttle levers that got a Wood brown on them, and the valve manifold levers next to the throttles got painted black. At this point I noticed I didn't actually have the correct green so I didn't finish the front wall or the joystick's stick part.

On the instrument panel I based the dials black. I thought I got them nicely done in one go but the photos revealed how wrong I was again: half-coated at best. Then I touched up a couple of toggles with red (VMA 71003 Red RLM23) but I didn't pull button or switch colours out of my hat to force variety.

 

After a couple of days in between and popping by a paintshop I continued on the plane. Some of the RLM66 bits got mostly prepainted into the sprues so I wouldn't be in weird problems in a difficult moment while building the cockpit. I didn't expect to have pinpointed all the difficulties in advance so it was more than likely that I'd be still touching up for days to come.

While I was fixing my doings, I filled up the panel faces in black (VMA 71057 Black) and then smudged some dial-like stuff on them. I really didn't dare to try to poke any white, yellow, and red sectors onto the three rows of engine dials on the right, I'd only made a mess if I tried to. Of course I didn't try to fill them all semicorrectly, I wasn't even sure if these could be seen in the first place. After taking these photos and letting the paint dry, I coated the dials with Vallejo's Gloss Varnish.

Onto the engine's three-row dialset I just painted the background in cold grey and then off-white (VMA 71119 White Grey) switches. I didn't try to do anything cooler than that, I imagined one could barely see these later on. After taking the photos and allowing the paint to dry I coated all the dial faces with Vallejo's Gloss Varnish (70510). 

Radar operator's workstation

Now that I had spent a couple of days on the pilot's stuff and partially painted some upcoming things, I finally could glue some radar dude's things together. When I was prepainting I concentrated on things I now knew to be difficult to paint later. While painting I left the attachment points as clear as possible, when I recognized them, to avoid making a mess with the glue. This wasn't perfect, of course. Compared to the pilot's space the radar operator's side was much flimsier and only connected to the whole from a tiny stud hooked into the pilot's back plate.

 

Seats with belts

To support the gluings I used Vallejo's liquid putty. While that stuff was curing I finished up the seats that also ended up getting the decal seatbelts on them. They were neat-looking, but just as annoying as decals usually have been. Both had the same problems, maybe I could use a drop of paint to get the left shoulder belt's attachment loops stuck in place?

Inner armoured tub

Getting the tub's halves together was more bothersome than I hoped for. As I guess I should've expected, I hadn't been as precise as German engineers when building the cockpit so I had to sand and file a bit to get the crap squeezed in place. To support my inner peace I used more liquid putty to seal the setup, and left the setup to cure. I could sand them down the next evening before jumping a couple of sections noseward .

It was funny how quickly the cockpit turned much more claustrophobic. Not much of the tub's inner walls were visible but I had painted and drybrushed them so they would be properly done. There was a red handle on the righthand side of the pilot's side wall. Again, if my memory served, it was for releasing the drop tanks or bombs. That most likely wasn't something one could see from a closed cockpit, but it was there, a RLM23 red handle in a sea of RLM66 darkness.

As planned I sanded the largest clumps of dry putty off the next evening and painted the outsides metallic (Vallejo Metal Color Airbrush Colors 77702 Duraluminium), and the upper edges in RLM66.