At this stage I’d made the hinges and satisfied myself that they would work but hadn’t started the wings so the photo above is really out of sequence but it’s the only one I’ve got of a finished hinge showing the bolt.
The next job was to furnish the cockpit; one advantage of these early planes is that they were very basic in the instrumentation department. The throttle and fuel switch etc. were made from scrap aluminium or plastic tube and balsa.
As mentioned above the floor is yet to be added.
I hoped that it would be a simple job to use the photo of the full size panel but unfortunately because of parallax (hope that’s spelt correctly!) some of the dial faces are partly hidden by the bezels and whilst not obvious at first sight, perspective has made the outer dials oval.
After spending many a happy hour on Photoshop I produced acceptable dials etc. These were correctly spaced using Publisher and printed out on “Glossy Photo Paper”. The control panel itself is made from card covered with litho plate, the dial printout, a sheet of clear acetate and finally another layer of card. The bezels are cut from card and the “level flight” indicator is a length of Bowden cable outer.
The clarity possible using “cheap” technology is amazing, this photo doesn’t do the dial faces justice. I used a high-resolution setting when printing out and, although way “over the top”, it is possible to read the serial number on the rpm indicator using a magnifying glass!