The first thing people seem to look at on any scale model is the cockpit; therefore the padded edging needs careful attention. A good starting point is some split earth wire sleeving. Given a coat of brown paint it’d look just like “brown painted earth sleeving”, so it really does need covering with leather.
I searched high and low for some thin brown leather but couldn’t find any anywhere, then I remembered that I had an old “reversible” leather belt, black one side brown the other. Because it was made from 2 pieces sewn together the leather was not all that thick, but still too thick for what I needed! After separating the 2 halves, more in hope than expectation I fitted a rough sanding drum into the Dremmell, much to my surprise it worked and half an hour latter I had a strip of very thin leather; the down side was that I had produced what seemed to be an inordinately large amount of rather unpleasant smelling dust.
I used contact adhesive to glue the leather to the sleeving. I fitted the split sleeving to some paxolin sheet after first having covered the edge with paper, applied the glue then held the leather in place with clamps and a couple of steel rules.
The observant will have noticed that it isn’t earth sleeving in the photo; for the first attempt I used fuel tubing but the contact adhesive wouldn’t stick to it! I’ve used fuel tubing before with no trouble but this was a new “environmentally friendly” contact adhesive.
The finished padding was first stitched to the fuselage, which was then turned upside down and thin cyano “wicked” around the edge to finally hold everything securely in position.
Linear Mode
