Getting into the Meteor
Before you get going, you might just want to get hold of this rather excellent little Wings & Wheels Publications reference book, it’s excellent and one of a series that is aimed squarely at the scale modeller. The title has many walk around-style images including the cockpit of preserved airframes and gives some nice ideas as to additional detail you might want to add. For me I kept this additional detail down to a minimum, mainly because the ‘pit is so small, painted dark grey (Revell No 9 matt) and you won’t see too much in 1:72 scale.
First task is to prepare the cockpit parts and this was easy enough. He resin seat just need to be removed from its moulding block and I used a modeller’s razor saw for that. Mounting the cockpit parts on a peg and Blu-Tac putty to secure, everything is sprayed Dark grey with Revell No.9 – a great colour to create scale-black. When dry, I dry-brushed all the nicely raised detail using a Humbrol light grey – it doesn’t really matter what actual colour – just a light grey to help bring out and highlight the detail that’s there.
These show the three stages to completion of the cockpit parts. In the final one you can see the finished parts just waiting to be installed into the cockpit tub.
The Martin baker seat will be added right at the end of the build to avoid inevitable damage during the main painting and weathering. Rather oddly, the yellow-black ejection handle above the pilot’s head isn’t provided on the small pre-painted etched fret so I resorted to one from an old Reheat etched brass set. The one used came from a 1:48 scale set but to be honest looks right to me for this resin kit seat, so lucky there.
