Canopy and Turrets

Welcome back to my blog. Today you will see how I built and detailed the turrets and

how I detailed the canopy.

I will start with the canopy. Unfortunately there is a lot of detail quite visible from the outside but nothing is provided by HK.

There are 3 beautiful drawings in the Dambuster Book from Mark Postlethwaite:

View to back

Yellow handle in movable window

Handles above the front windows

Here is a list of what I added to the canopy:

• Sun-Protection curtain for the pilot

• Bullet-Proof window for the Flight-Engineer

• Yellow handles at movable side windows

• Handles above front windows

• Bump-protection at the rear

The first thing I scratched was the curtain. For the curtain I used the cover of a yogurt-cup folded several times and bent to realistic shape. The leather fixing-straps are Tamiya-Tape and the fixation-holders at the roof are made from Evergreen sheet.

Next was the bullet-proof window for the Flight-Engineer again provided by my friend Sven. It was masked for painting of the frame:

The yellow handles in the side-windows followed. For them I used small wire bent to correct shape and glued with contacta clear into holes I carefully drilled to the window frames. Painting was done after assembly:

The black handles above the front windows were easy to create from fine wire and glued in place:

Next thing to do was the bump-protection at the rear of the cockpit. I used black Milliput to replicate it. Since the bullet-proof window is placed exactly on the bump-protection I test-fitted the canopy to the fuselage when the Milliput was still soft (Milliput dries after 2 hours and can be treated like Plasticine. I can highly recommend it). You can see the imprint on the top of the protection:

This is how the canopy looks like in total.

The side window of the pilot is open. It had therefore to be completely painted and glued in open position into the canopy. Installation at the end of the build is impossible. All gluing was done with Bondic (except the handles):

I made the mistake to mask and spray the canopy before attaching it to the cockpit.

Therefore I had to check after gluing the canopy to the fuselage if the fit of the bullet-proof window was ok:

Fortunately the fit was perfect.

Second part of this post belongs to the turrets:

The turrets are well detailed but there is still some extra work to be done to bring them to a realistic standard.

The front turret has a lot of holes within the structure to save weight. None of them are present in the parts except their shape. This meant that I had to drill about 20 holes in different diameters to the parts:

The fit of this construction in the base plate was not satisfying. I had to rework it. Also some quite visible ejector pin-marks on the basic plate had to be removed:

After painting the gun-sight had to be added. Needless to say that it is missing in the kit. Scratchbuilding was done with clear Evergreen sheet:

Next came the cover which was masked with perfect fitting Eduard masks. Without these masks it would have been a time consuming job:

Belts from the Eduard-Set were shortened, weathered and attached to the seat:

Then I moved to the rear turret. Fortunately the were no additional holes to be drilled but there are 2 glass-parts which have to be taken care of because Eduard only provides 2 masks for each glass part which should normally be four masks. I realized this only after having sanded the unmasked glass-part for better fit. But these are the windows through which the gunner looks outside! So I had to remove it, sand and polish it and give it a final coat of future to get it clear again. Then I prepainted and masked it and attached it for a second time. I should have better taken a look at the original fotos before 😉:

After that I painted everything:

As for the front turret I added seatbelts and the gunsight:

Last thing was to apply the masks to the cover of the turret:

This is how the turrets look like after painting the glass-parts:

This was all for today. In the next post I will describe how I prepared the fuselage and its parts for the installation of the electronics. Looking forward to meeting you again. Happy Pentecost!