I've made a start on the seat. Once this is done, it's time for a batch of painting. Then I can start putting everything together. I still have to decide what paints to use, but more on that later.
The first thing I tackled was the headrest, or rather the bulkhead that the headrest is mounted on. I just carved this from plastic card with my usual trial-and-error technique. As usual, this seemed rather a hopeless task to start with, but in the end it went quite well and I got quite a good fit. I decided to carve the headrest itself separately and add it after painting, so the only other detail to attend to at this stage was the slot for the Sutton harness. This turned out to be pretty simple to do. I just drilled a central pilot hole, then used the same drill bit as a sort of file or router to open it up into a slot, with the result you see here:
The next job is the seat itself, and this is where it gets slightly difficult. My main printed reference (David Luff, 1987), says that the seat was adjustable, and provides some useful details of the mechanism, but I can't find any photos or diagrams of the seat or the adjustment gear. So in the end, I have had to fall back on existing products. I seem to remember that I warned against this in my previous post, and I am aware of the danger that I will end up effectively making a model of other models; but this is a risk I will have to take in this case.
What I ended up doing was studying the online instructions for the Airfix 1:48 Bulldog and then trying to build something that represented what the Airfix kit is trying to represent. It would have been nice to effectively reverse-engineer the Airfix moulding to understand the workings of the mechanism. But in the end, I just decomposed it (as we say in software engineering), to end up with a set of individual parts that look like this:
I think it should look reasonably convincing once it's in place. But that's enough for one day. More soon.
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