I love this aircraft... The history, the style, the size, the shine... :-) This is my second B-29 I've built, however the first time was... do I admit it... 20 years ago. Wow, was it that long ago. :-)

I picked up this model from our local hobby shop in the used section. It turns out that the previous owner (who is now friend of mine) spent a huge amount of work and time opening up the right side of the fuselage, exposing the two bomb bays and the rear compartment.

I was tempted to alter the rear compartment to show the bombing radar that was added later on but I decided against that for this go-around. The rear compartment will have just the bunks and the biff in there. I did however open up the door between the bunk room and the fire control room, just to try my hand at scratch building. :-)

Following are a few pictures I have taken showing the fuselage details. In the near future I'm hoping to include pictures of the completed cockpit, which I am rather happy with...

Until then...

Percy
 
 

Shot of the major components in it's original box. To gain an appreciation of the size of this model, the white rectangle at the bottom right is a folded piece of paper towel.

You can just make out the fuselage opened up. See below for close-ups of the cutout job, which BTW, I cannot take credit for. This was done by a fellow club member at our local modeling club, VSM (Victoria Scale Modelers).
 
 

This is a shot of the two fuselage halves after being painted with Model Master Acryl Interior Green. I decided to go with the interior green instead of Chromate Green because most of the color pictures I've seen appear to be the darker shade. Also note that the rear of the cockpit has been opened up (better shot of this below).
 
 

Well, I figured that since the whole bomb bay was completely visible, why not see the inside of the cockpit. There is a significant amount of detail at the rear of the cockpit that is not normally visible in the finished model.

What I did was cut, using a small hobby saw, along one of the panel lines. When the cutting was done, I lined the edges of the cut with thin sheet styrene to fill the gap of cutaway plastic. Not shown in this picture is the insert that sits in this spot.

Side view of the cutout. As you can see, this is quite a work of art (once again, not done by me, but by a fellow club member). Visible near the front is the white border of the cutout I did for the cockpit.
 
 

When I received this model all the parts were off the sprue, which is different from the methods I usually use. However, having everything laid out like this is nice for organizing all the major components. Note that all the interior parts have been sprayed with Interior Green.
 
 

Coming soon - Here!

Photographs of the interior during construction. Click on each thumbnail for a larger image.

	A closeup of the completed cockpit. If you look closely you can see the levers added to the engineer station (top center). The cockpit has been drybrushed with silver and a wash of black added.
	A different shot of the cockpit and front bomb bay.
	An overall shot of the one side completed.
	An outside shot showing most of the interior in place.

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