Upgrading the cockpit with Eduard-Brass

Welcome back again in my blog. Today I want to describe the cockpit-upgrade from Eduard for the cockpit of the Lancaster and the Head-Up-Display the pilot in the Lancaster had.

The HK-Kit comes with a very simple cockpit i.e. that the parts do have instruments, etc. but without good faces and there are no decals to enhance them. Another thing I cannot understand for a kit with this price. Therefore one possible alternative is to use the Eduard Cockpit-Brass for detailing. This is the way I went.

The set is one of the sets included in Eduards Big ED Part 1 for the Lancaster B MK1 (refer to one of my former posts for details). It includes parts for the:

- Pilots instrument panel

- Flight-Engineer panel

- Some electronic equipment of the Navigator (but not all :-;)

- Electronic equipment of the Radio-Operator

This is how the set looks like:

Unfortunately there are no parts included for the "Gee-Boxes" of the Navigator and no parts for

the electronic boxes of the bomb-aimers compartment. Since these boxes are quite visible from

the outside when the model is completed I don't understand that Eduard didn't include anything for them in their set. So there is no other possibility than to paint and detail these parts by yourself.

I will not describe the process how I prepared the kit-parts and glued the brass-parts to the panels since I believe that most of the readers of this blog are used to using brass-parts.

What I did in addition was to enhance all dials and screens with Tamiya clear gloss varnish to

simulate the glasses.

Here are some pics of the instrument-panels and the faces of the electronic boxes:

The instrument-panel:

The panel of the flight engineer:

The panels for the Navigator and the Wireless-Operator:

In my last article I mentioned that the Lancaster had a real Head-Up-Display.

It was placed in front of the pilot in the middle of the windscreen:

It consisted of:

- a Turn-and-Bank-Indicator (left)

- a Repeater-Compass (right)

- a Super-fine Altimeter (above)

The first 2 were installed in every Lancaster and the 3rd was only installed in the Dambuster.

This enabled the pilot to keep his head up and have the most important informations available

at eyesight. This was very important especially for the Dambusters since the final approach to the dams was very short and had to be flown extremely precise to deliver the "Upkeep" - as the bounching-bomb was codenamed - within the required parameters.

So this really was one of the first HUDs even though very basic.

Eduard supplies the first 2 instruments but without any casing and cabling. You have to add the third one by yourself if you want to build a Dambuster.

So I added the third instrument made out of an old brass-plate out of the spares-box and the dial

comes from an Airscale-Decal-Set. I also added the instrument-housing and a cable at each, because they are visible through the windshield when the model is finished.

Here are 2 pictures how it looks like:

This was all regarding available EDUARD-Upgrade for the cockpit.

The Gee-Set, which is highly visible in the "office" in the end, had no parts provided by Eduard.

So I painted and detailed it by myself by adding Airscale placards and some cabling.

The result looks quite convincing for me:

That's all for today. In the next post I will describe, how I painted the figures add will show you

some pictures of the assembled cockpit and it's details. Have a nice weekend and I see you next time...