SO, the gentleman who bought my Tamiya Phantom asked me to build a F-15E for him as well. The kit arrived, and knowing especially the seats need some extra detailing, I went ahead and ordered a set of Quickboost seats. So here is the challenge:
The Quickboost seats are smaller than the kit seats. I don’t know which one is out of scale, but the images shows the difference.
The second challenge is that there are two screws in the cockpit floor, which will be covered by the kit seat, but with the resin seat, that is not an option. My thought is to raise the resin seat to kit on top of the screws since it’s smaller, or to scrap them and get some seatbelts for the kit seat, which btw. are hard to find. I figured Eduard made sealbelts for the ACES II seat, but they don’t. They make them for the Sufa F-16, but in the wrong color.
Thats a big size differance in those seats. I did a quick search on scalemates and Edurad did a PE set for those deats. It is from 2007, but according to this, there are still sites selling it.
Judging by the size difference I’d almost say those are 1/48 seats. Might contact the company and send them that pic along with the part # on the package and see what they say…
Thanks for the suggestions and link to the PE seatbelts. I may just take that route if I can procure a set. The Quickboost seats are much larger than 1/48 scale. Not sure where they went wrong, or maybe it’s Tamiya who messed up? Quickboost is part of Aires and they usually do good stuff.
Update: eBay came to the rescue. Not sure why I was not able to find it before, but once I put in Eduard 32601, they popped up. Kit seats it is.
The only major difference I see in those seats is the risers built onto the kit seats that the QB seat does not have. If you ignor those the seats are very close in size. Raising the seat to sit above the screws with those kit risers would solve the issue and its a much more realistic looking seat too. If it were my kit I would swap over the risors and use the QB seats. But, it’s not my kit. Good luck.
Thanks for the input on the seats. I do agree the QB seats look better and I wonder if they actually took the screw locations into consideration when designing the seat. If you put the seat directly on top of the screws, they pretty much have same height as the kit seats.
Here’s a little bit of progress and both seats as comparizon.
Started working on the intakes and afterburners. Unfortunately, there is no good way to deal with the seams on the inside, but little will be seen once it all comes together.
The cockpit in permanently installed. The access panel will be detailed later on.
Finally, the M61A1 was built, detailed and installed.
