Hi all,

I bought myself a Trumpeter warthog and now I have a small problem. I want to paint the interior of my cockpit and after that mount it in the plane. The problem is that I can only do that when the both sides of the fusselage (correct word?) are not yet glued together. But if I paint the cockpit first, and after that I glue the fusselage, I am in big touble if I have to paint the fusselage. Since I am not an experienced airplane modeller, only armor and ships, I want to as you guys how you normally solve this problem?

regards Matthijs

Best bet is to paint the cockpit, seal up the fuselage around it, then paint and detail the inside of the canopy. Next, mount the canopy in the closed position, (if you plan on having canopy displayed open, temporarily tack the canopy with elmers or other craft glue). Lastly, once the model is ready for paint, tape off the canopy that is to remain clear and paint the canopy frames along with the rest of the model. Take your time and go slowly and it should turn out great.

As I do with helicopter models, I paint the exterior before I glue the fusalage together. Then place the cockpit in, and glue it all up. the sand the glue seams, and retouch them with a paint brush. :-)

Yellow:

The best system I have found when building a plane that size is to break the model down into 5 sections:

1. Bulid the cockpit completely
2. Mount the cockpit and glue the fuselage halves togather.
3. Build the wings stabilizers
4 Landing gear
5 Ordnance/bomb racks and such.

The mount the wings to the fuselage. Fill and sand all gaps to your satisfaction.
Mask the cockpit however you want to. Some people stuff it with tissue paper. I have seen some even put the canopy on with it totally masked off to cover it up. Mask the wheel wells with either tissue paper or a paper towl stuffed in them.

Mount all blade antenaes pitot tubes and such. Anything on the plane that would be included in the overall paint scheme.
Then paint the whole thing at once. This eliminates sanding off the final paint job and if detail is lost you can either rescribe or whatever w/o messing the paint up any further. Keeping touch ups to a minimum.

Once painted and dried with a couple coats of future or gloss coats, mount decals,
mount the completed landing gear, ordnance loads and other dangly bits. Weather to your preferance.

Give the whole thing a nice coat of dull coat.. then Whola done.

Depending on the instrctions you may have to jump around alot. I usually taks a pencil and mark off the parts on the sheet that I have glue out of sequence to keep it all straight in my head...
Hope all this helps and can't wait to see Pics of that hog of yours.

Warlock Out

Another way to do it would be to paint and detail your cockpit, install between fuselage halves, clean up all seams and add the windscreen to the front section of the cockpit, make sure the seam between the windscreen and the fuselage is smooth,mask the windscreen so the bracing is the same color of the area around it. When your ready to paint the rest of the plane just take some wet tissue and gently push it into the cockpit to act as a mask, you can also do this to the inside of the windscreen to protect that too, remember to double check that all areas are covered, have fun, Wingman out.

wingman does what I do for all my interiors. Paint the interior, assemble the shells around it. Mask off the interior and then paint the rest. I have used the technique on vehicles and planes. It somtimes is best to leave the joystick and/or sight off till after the masking is removed.
capnjock

Roger that Captain, it's best to leave off the joystick and such in case you push down to far with that wet tissue or whatever material you are using,Wingman .out