Building the seat

Anticipating future post-flight repairs of the cockpit, I felt it would be wise to make the pilot seat removable for easy access to cockpit components. Also, I knew that the tall seat protruding from the cockpit floor would be supporting the weight of the pilot and be under a lot of stress from engine vibration. Therefore I decided to make it out of 3/32" aircraft ply to keep it structural resilient.

After building the a platform "box" I made a seat base, and curved riser framework. I drilled quite a few lightening holes in the ply to try to minimize the inevitable weight gain. I also added some 1/4" balsa cross-struts in the base for tortional strength.

Before assembling this structure I installed three 6-32 blind nuts in the base so I could mount the seat to the cockpit floor with nylon bolts. With the framework completed, I skinned the seat with 1/32 aircraft ply. The curve of the bucket was obtained by wetting the curved area, bending it, and warping it to shape with a heat gun.

Once the seat was built, I had the option of either glassing it or surfacing it with styrene. This provides a smooth surface for FliteMetal application and hides any imperfections or wood grain. I decided to go with the 10mil styrene sheeting, as I thought it might be lighter than glassing and certainly would be easier/faster than glassing.

Once the styrene was applied, I then applied FliteMetal over all surfaces of the seat that would be visible after installation. The FM material was burnished down good and scuff-sanded with a sanding sponge for better paint adhesion.

With all the FliteMetal applied, I proceeded to painting the seat. I decided to test a new technique out for painting and weathering the seat...

This time I first painted the whole seat with the Tamiya "Yellow-Green" that I use to weather with. After drying, I then airbrushed the seat with Model Masters "Zinc Chromate Green" and began weathering as usual. However, this time I didn't do any weathering with the Yellow-Green like I usually do. Instead, I sanded the paint in areas of wear with a sanding sponge and steel wool. This "wore" the paint down through the Yellow-Green all the way to the FliteMetal.

Many of the pics I have seen of full-scale cockpits exhibited the yellower colors of green where the paint wears. I'm not sure why this is, other than the possiblility of multiple paintings of the interior with different batches of green, which show through when worn.

At any rate, I felt this would be a more "natural" method of distressing the seat paint and it looks quite realistic. After the paint was "worn off" I went back and airbrushed a little more dust and dirt on the seat to dirty up the bare metal areas.

Once the seat was completely painted & weathered, I proceeded to install it in the cockpit with the three 6-32 nylon bolts. Note that I did reinforce the 1/8" balsa floor with a 1/32" aircraft ply doubler on the underside. This would keep the bolt heads from drawing down into the balsa.