I then spent an hour assembling the rear cockpit boarding ladder, from Flightpath:
It’s white metal and etched brass, and the steps were so fiddly that I doubt that I could have bent them into their proper shape without a Hold ‘n’ Fold tool. I haven’t put the wheels on it here, as they needed to be painted white as they were apparently white nylon.
Then I gave the Flightpath boarding ladder a coat of white primer ready for painting, and it revealed all sorts of roughness in the castings which form the ladder sides. Should have sorted those out before assembly really, but just couldn’t see them until the primer went on. Back to square one.
The boarding ladder started off like this:
…and then I added some paint:
Then I spent half an hour dry-brushing with black, brown, primer yellow and iron to create a bit of a worn look:
After that it was a bit of detail painting and adding the wheels:
Extreme closeup, as the weathering doesn’t show up otherwise:
I unmasked the cockpit transparencies, and they unmasked with nice sharp edges to the frames. Unfortunately, the windscreen section was unmasked to discover that for some unknown reason, I didn’t paint the cockpit coaming far enough down to the joint with the windscreen, and as a result there was a wobbly unpainted strip of bare plastic visible near the bottom edge on the inside! Rookie mistake. It was too glaring to leave, the work already done filling, fairing, fettling and painting over the outer joint made the prospect of removing the thing unattractive, and the gap twixt screen and coaming was too small to get a thin brush in there.
After much head-scratching, I bent a hypodermic needle so that it would fit all the way down the inside of the windscreen, and used it to carefully inject black paint along the inner seam, filling it just enough to stain over the bare plastic but not enough to smear over the inside of the transparency. Result.