Russian aircraft aren’t something
I’d normally build, but the IPMS(UK)’s Aerobatic Display Team SIG’s theme
for last year’s Scale Modelworld was Russian teams, so I volunteered to build
a MiG-29 from the Test Pilots team, who famously collided with one another at
Fairford some years ago.
I originally intended to use the
Airfix kit, which my fiancée had in her stash, but then learnt that the
original aircraft were the humpbacked 9-13S variant, whilst the kit was the
earlier 9-12A. After fruitlessly seeking a conversion set to modify the
kit, I then learnt that the ICM kits were of the 9-13S. A check on the
Models For Sale website revealed two different boxings, 72141 with decals for a
camouflaged aircraft & 72142 with Swifts markings. The camo version
was £1 cheaper, so natural meanness took over & I opted for that,
assuming the difference would be due to the Swifts kit having a more extensive
decal sheet, which would be of no use to me anyway. When the kit arrived, I found it to be extremely crude - I was not impressed, but set to work
anyway. A couple of weeks later my good friend Brad in Texas, who was
planning to build the other aircraft of the pair, told me that he’d acquired
the Swifts boxing & that his kit seemed different to the description I’d
given him of mine, so I ordered one myself. A couple of days later the
kit arrived & I was very surprised to find that it was actually a completely
different & much better tooling, so the original kit was put back in the
box & I made a start on the new one.
Click on
images below to see larger images
Although the new kit was much
more detailed & more crisply moulded, it still fitted together poorly,
especially the main intakes, which required copious filling & sanding to
get anywhere near an acceptable result. Several fill/sand/prime cycles
later, things were looking much better & it was time for paint.
I’d looked at various photos of the real thing & the shade of blue seemed
to vary enormously from one to another, though oddly the yellow seemed much
less variable. Eventually I settled on Tamiya spraycans of Camel Yellow
& Light Blue, which were a reasonable match to some of the pics. As
usual, the yellow was translucent & covered very poorly, requiring several
light coats over the space of an evening. Eventually I arrived at a
result with which I was happy & left it for a week to harden properly.
Once the yellow had set, I
masked it off before I sprayed the blue. In order to ensure that I
didn’t get steps in the paint where it’d been masked, I decided to
soft-edge mask with Blu Tak, which turned out not to be one of my better ideas
- either I hadn’t pressed the Blu Tak down firmly enough, or the Tamiya paint
reacted with it, but the blue bled under the masking in numerous places,
leaving a real mess. Fortunately, since I’d masked down the middle of
what would become the black area, most of the unwanted blue would be covered by
the black, but I had to do some patching with yellow-painted decal on both fins
& entirely cover the top of the starboard tailplane with it, but in the end
it wasn’t too obvious.
When it was time to apply the
black, it became obvious that my chances of successfully masking & painting
it were right up there with my chances of being made Archbishop of Canterbury on
the day I won the National Lottery, ie extremely slim !! Consequently, I
fell back on Plan B & used black decal. Most of it was outlined with
a mix of Xtradecal & Kemco stripes & then infilled with brush-painted
Humbrol gloss black & the sections on top of the engines, the centre
section of the wing undersurface & the tailplane undersides were cut from a
sheet of Microscale solid decal. It was a rather long-winded process,
but turned out to be relatively simple & generally successful. A few
coats of Future to level everything up & it was time for the rest of the
decals.
Obtaining decals for the project
ran much less smoothly than it should have done. I sat on the info for
much too long before I sent it off to my friend Jacob to produce the artwork,
then asked him to perform miracles before I ran out of time. The plan was
that Brad would print them, but there was a problem with the graphics file
& he’d gone away on a course when the revised version arrived, so I had
to do the best I could myself. The Russian insignia on the fins was
printed from Jacob’s artwork onto white decal using my inkjet printer &
the logo on the upper starboard nose printed onto clear decal. The fin
serial numbers were Modeldecal RAF serials & the white Aviatika lettering on
the intakes was white Letraset, rubbed down onto clear decal film. Some
of the photos show the Aviatika logo on the intake in front of the titles, but
others don’t - when I looked at the logos, they looked like self-adhesive
stickers, since the area around them was discoloured & I came to the
conclusion that they were applied to the aircraft after they arrived at Fairford. Since I was modelling the aircraft with three droptanks, as if it had
just arrived, I felt safe omitting the logos.
Once the decaling was complete,
that just left the seat, canopy, undercarriage, jetpipes & droptanks.
The seat was True Details, donated by Brad, the jetpipes Brad’s own castings
to replace the less-accurate kit versions & everything else was from the kit. It was all brush-painted 7 superglued into place, together with some
simple plasticard intake blanks. Lowering the finished item onto its
wheels revealed the final problem - with all the tanks & the resin jetpipes, the accursed thing’s a tail sitter. It was too late to do anything
before Scale Modelworld, so I put a prop under the rear of the centreline tank, but when I get round to it - probably any decade now !! - I’ll remove one of
the intake blanks & add some lead to the intake to hold the nosewheel on the
ground.
All of the above makes it sound
like a real battle, but much of the trouble was of my own making, largely
because I left it too late to start the project & everything was done in a
mad rush. On the whole though, I’m generally pleased with the model
& it’s certainly an eye-catching addition to the collection.
John Green
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