Since the cockpit gets sealed up inside the fuselage, I have to deal with it first.  The photos below show the process.  The five major components (2 sidewalls, tub with seat, instrument panel, and display) were cut out, cleaned up, and primed.  The sidewalls had HUGE ejector pin marks in prominent positions, so I filled and sanded, primed, repeated as necessary.  I then cut in and painted the black panels by hand, something I don’t normally do, but they were just too tiny to mask.

After that, I began to mask off the seat and the top of the instrument panel, both also to be in black.  The seat was tricky, and I wish it had been a separate assembly to ease the process, but you work with what you have. I started by “cutting in” the seat with extremely small 1mm tape.  Once that was completed I went around again using 5mm wide Tamiya masking tape and blue painters tape.  Once that was all set and the lines were clean where I needed them, everything else was covered with Silly Putty, and the paint sprayed.  The last two photos show the paint and masks after spraying, and then after all masking removed.

Time to mask the seat: 1 hours, 20 minutes.
Time to paint the seat: 2 minutes.
Time to remove all the masking: less than 2 minutes.

I’ve been contracted to build a model of the Colonial Viper MKII, from the new Battlestar Galactica series.  I’m using the recent release of the Moebius  Models kit, 1/32nd scale in plastic.

Below are some photos of the kit parts, decals, a sample page from the instructions, etc.

My goal is to have this build completed by the first weekend in April, so that I can enter it in our yearly MosquitoCon contest, and then ship it to the client the following week.  Quite a goal, considering how slowly I generally build, but my lack of employment at the moment should allow me to meet my deadline.  I’ve already started construction on the cockpit, photos will be in the next post.