[shrike]

Time to finish up the cockpit.

The seat is an openwork affair. A new sharp blade is a must.
As an aside, I opened the new box of Excell #11's, having finally finished of the box of dull and prone to tip-breakage Hobbico blades. With the fresh contrast I really have to reiterate my belief that Excell makes the best blade on the market.

The two pieces that make up the seat shell itself (front and back) are sized perfectly to allow for the curvature. Normally I would laminate them and then cut them out together, and I'm glad I didn't this time. Same for the side frames. The seat cushion is softish 1mm. I used a burnishing tool to soften the edges and add a little wear (ie. butt-prints).
The seat support is supposed to be just a pair of solid pieces with tubing and shadows printed on them, but I cut out the spaces between the tubes. At first I thought about using them that way, figuring that no one will ever see it, but then I realized that that's true of the whole cockpit. Outside of these pictures, no one will ever see that either.

I used a second print of the cockpit sheet and cut out instruments and attached them to the panel.

There weren't any seatbelts, so I did those out of some bond paper crumpled for texture. The seat belt attach points and the buckle are more of the 32 ga wire. The seat attach fittings typify "never be seen again" and are the sort of thing that prompts the wife to tell me I'm nuts.