HpH, which was an excellent company based out of eastern Europe, has closed their doors. They made unique resin kits of various subjects mainly WWII. One of their more popular kits was the Me-410 and theirs was the only kit in 1/32 scale. There have been many other models of the Me-410, but all were either 1/72 or 1/48. The most recent kit of the Me-410 is the Meng 1/48 Scale.
HpH kits, are the most impressive and the most difficult I have ever attempted. Their directions are limited in words instead relying mainly on pictures and numbers. I am slowly working toward finishing this kit, but wanted to stop and show some images of the complete cockpit. Note, I had to replace two of the control arms before I took the pictures and they have not been painted back to the correct colors.
This cockpit has a lot of potential for detailing. However the parts are all formed from resin and are very fragile. For example the control column that came with the kit was broken in two and I was not able to locate both parts, so I substituted a 3rd Part part. The bottom of the cockpit is the top of the bomb bay where all the guns are located. I have not started on that yet as I feel it is best to get the cockpit mounted in the aircraft first.
The Instrument panels are all from Eduard, and are included in the kit. You have to removed all of the detail that the kit has to use them. There are pros and cons here. The detail of the kit part is more realistic in 3d, in that you see the various parts of the panels raised up. Whereas the Eduard parts are basically 2D flat, and you have to attach some very very fine parts for the control handles.
The color of the early Eduard RLM66 was way too purple/blue and does not look correct against a cockpit that is painted in RLM66, however I felt it was the only way to really show the details of of the various dials of the instruments. Hand painting the dials really was not an option. However if I build another version of this kit, I might try using the Airscale decals in the resin mounts. I would still have to paint each instruments case black.
The paint used on this was MRP RLM66, I primed the kit with Mission Models grey primer. I have found that the Mission Models primer adheres the best to this type of resin.
I choose to add a few extra details, mainly the wires coming out the various instruments as this part of the cockpit will be visible. I have left off the seat for now as I only want to add it later after the kit is painted.
The Eduard set comes with some very small parts that are to be used as the various control handles, for throttles and other controls. These parts are very hard to glue onto the panels and I have found that they also tend to get knocked off, I used stretched sprue to re-create several of the various handles. I also added wiring from the rudder control boxes. All the wiring just has to go to the side of the control panel as it will be out of sight once the part is in place.
A few notes, the back panel is very thin to start with and mine started to break in half so I had to add a plastic support brace. This has to be very thin as if it’s any larger, one of the pieces of the bomb bay will not fit.