Cabin interior
Looking at the previous pics, you can clearly see the red seats with their white headrest covers and I’d like to create this as the model should look a lot better for it.
Rather than make one big section of flooring that would need lots of trimming and test-fitting, it’s much quicker and easier to treat each side of the cabin separately. Not enough light gets into the interior to worry about the small gap where the isle would be – nobody can see it :)
Just cut a length of balsa for each side and support it at either end using a small section of kit sprue – nice and easy way to get the floors level and equal.
I reckon that just adding a small block for each seat helps to position all the seating in the right place and again, small sections of balsa do the trick. Cyano glue works perfectly on the balsa :)
By the time you’ve added the blocks, you can cut up small sections of flat balsa sheet to make simple seats and backrests. These are made up and painted Tamiya Flat Red (XF-7).
The headrest covers are just small sections of metal foil from an old wine bottle top.
You can see with the right fuselage side the red seats show up nicely through the window and that’s all you’ll see when the model is complete and so I’m glad we’ve had some fun adding the seats – all very quick and easy to do.
Here’s a look at my finished Heron and I do think this small effort was worth the time it took. Really happy with using balsa too for tasks like this and I’m sure that I’ll use it again on some of the other Classic kit builds planned!
Good luck!
Geoff C.
David Baker says
Alan Hall would be proud of you! And lovely to see multiple materials blending age-old techniques with existing kits – albeit of a certain vintage. Such a rush these days to PE and resin that the merging of wood and plastic harks back to a more creative age. Such a lot of modelling these days is “assembling” from multiple bags and boxes of garage-market buy-ins rather than being ingeniously creative and it was lovely to see that. Fantastic!
Geoff Coughlin says
Excellent David – glad you like it 👍 really enjoying these builds in among the new kits etc in SMN.
More of the balsa approach in my Revell 1:32 F4U-1A Corsair build. Good luck!
GC
Derek Bradshaw says
Simple but effective Geoff, well done!
During the late 60’s to mid-70’s, balsa was pretty much the main (or only) material readily available for such work, so was very much a ‘necessity’ for such detail work until the advent of readily available plastic card and epoxy putty (I also used to aero model during this period, so working with balsa was easy for me).
In fact, balsa is still a fantastic material to use as core substrate for major conversions and scratch building (particularly in the larger scales).
Derek B
Geoff Coughlin says
Thanks Derek and I completely agree with what you say – easy to overlook these great materials in today’s modelling world… Best wishes, GC