Cockpit Seat for Biplane

My goal for yesterday was to get the cockpit seat for the new biplane built, painted and installed.  

As I mentioned in a previous blog entry, this biplane is for our garden railroad.  This plane is approximately 1:24 scale which is slightly smaller than the 1:20.3 scale of the trains.  Since this biplane will be positioned over tall plants a few feet over the garden railroad I figured being slightly smaller in scale was a good idea for getting just a little bit of forced perspective.  

I needed to make a seat for the cockpit mostly so the pilot could be positioned correctly and not fall into the fuselage of the plane.  This wasn't about modeling an accurate seat but more about a sturdy place for the pilot to be mounted in the cockpit since the seat is not visible with the pilot in place.  If the seat was visible, then I would have spent more time making it look like it belonged in the open cockpit of an old biplane.

I had already made one seat for this biplane but it turned out to be far too small.  Actually, the size wasn't even close to size it needed to be.  So, yesterday I set out to get the size right.

I went through four or five versions of the seat, each successive one larger than the previous, before I eventually made one so large that it wouldn't even fit in through the cockpit hole in the fuselage (which was a bit frustrating).  

The last one that I made needed to get cut down, filed down, then sanded a bit more before it would fit with a little bit of creative orientation before twisting it into place.  Then I needed to figure out how I was going to mount it in the cockpit.  I settled on using silicone caulking but the seat still needed to be a little higher.  The pilot was still sitting too low in the cockpit.  

The silicone caulking tube wouldn't fit into the fuselage so I dug out some tubing that I could put on the end of the caulking tube allowing me to reach down into the bottom of the cockpit.  Then I needed to set a mounting block into the caulking to raise the seat to the right height.  This mounting block moved a bit as I set it in the small bit of caulking.  It still didn't seem to be settled enough into the caulking so I used the caulking and tube again to squeeze more caulking underneath this blocking.  Once I squeezed enough caulking underneath and around this mounting block, I felt comfortable it would stay in place so I left it to dry.

While the caulking was drying, I painted the seat.  In hindsight, I should have painted the seat a slightly lighter color but the seat is not at all visible once the pilot is in place sitting in it so the color really doesn't matter.

Once the mounting block was set in place with the caulking, I realized the seat was slightly high which placed the pilot up too high.  I sanded about 1/8 inch off the bottom of the seat then I glued the seat to the blocking that I had mounted onto the bottom of the cockpit with some wood glue.  

I put a lot of effort into painting the pilot figure so I wanted as much of the pilot visible as seemed reasonable.  He is probably still sitting slightly high but this allows us a better view of the detail of the pilot figure...

This photo, below, shows the seat...  although it is a bit tough to see due to its dark color...

I still need to do some touch-ups on the pilot figure and then I should probably seal the figure so the paint doesn't rub off or fade.  

This was a nice little project and I'm pretty happy with the results.  I still need to figure out how I'm going to mount this biplane just over the tallest of plants but I think I'm at a stopping point for now.