The last week or so has been sorting parts, getting a few reprints done, and painting parts with grey primer, mostly cupola parts. When they're assembled and painted I'll post a picture or two. In the meantime I've started collaborating with an amazingly talented German chap, -another "Tim" - who has produced quite the most incredible miniaturised
working instrument panel for use with an FPV camera, and a far far better collimating gunsight than I was able to make. His gunsights are really works of art optically speaking, but are designed to be fitted as the gunsight for various fighter's fixed armament. Consequently he is able to achieve the focal length (If I understand the optics correctly) by having quite a long stem under the sight, which would of course disappear behind the instrument panel.
With the Mk III non-gyro sight as fitted to the FN5 turret, however, it's not possible to have such a "stem", so we're looking at bouncing the image around mirrors within the sight-box before it is reflected to a proper lens and thence to the reflector. Should be interesting!
Do please visit his Youtube channel, his work is quite
extraordinary.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJm4ZSKF0ZT3guMskwZp3EgI've also put up a couple of new films
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQslWREMy2zKgQW4ASDuh6QWhen driven out of the workshop by paint fumes, I've been drawing-up the gunner's lap-strap - a bit of a bugger to draw it has to be said - it's not perfect, but it's fairly close. If anyone is able to tell me if the release to undo an RAF lapstrap of this type is fitted to be pulled with left or right hand, I'd be most grateful to learn!
- The lap strap - right way around? (view from rear to forward)
- 600lapstrap3.jpg (46.11 KiB) Viewed 11802 times
In other developments I've established the stencilled warning on the exterior of the turret doors, and had this translated into Polish, having learned that all cautions and placards were translated into Czech or Polish for squadrons crewed by those nationalities. A stencil will be made to put those on in the closest font I can find to the exemplar I have.
An so it continues!