1/48 Academy Su-27 Flanker

Gallery Article by Ramon R. Lomeli on Oct 1 2015

 

      

Hello ARC! So here is another kit that I have had in my stash for way too long: Academy's 1/48 scale SU-27 Flanker purchased in some hobby shop I found while riding my bike around the city of Taegu, South Korea back in 1995-96. I purchased it for about the equivalent of $20 when it was retailing back in the states for about twice that. Back then, I used to think that $40 was a lot to pay for a model! 

It is a pretty decent kit out of the box, but it could still use some improvement in a few areas. For example, the cockpit is very simple compared to the rest of the kit. Unfortunately, my skills improved faster than the rate at which I was finishing this kit. I had closed up the fuselage and put it aside for a few years and by the time I had come back to it, I wish I had upgraded the cockpit with an aftermarket set. I had a resin K-36 ejection seat painted and ready to go, but it was too narrow for the kit cockpit. Between that and the extremely thick, out-of-scale fins on the missiles, I decided to just go with it and concentrate on making the paint job look good Closed canopy it shall be! 

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Whenever I had some paint left over from airbrushing another model, I would spray the left over paint on this Flanker in a pre-shading experiment. Yellows, greens, blacks, whatever - it went on. When I was ready, I used model master enamels for the camouflage but I wasn't satisfied with the hues of the first pass, so I mixed a few colors and went over it again, taking care to not totally cover up all of my pre-shading. In fact, I tried to let some of the original camouflage colors show through in an attempt to get a faded and worn post-Soviet finish. When I was done with that, I used Model Master clear gloss Acryl as a clear coat, then used Begemot decals to make a Russian jet. They went on easily and conformed beautifully with some micro set. I recommend Begemot decals and I will buy from them again! After the decals were applied and sealed in clear flat Acryl, I used an oil wash to weather and fade the paint a bit more. Moving on to the hot section, I had it masked off up until this point so that I could use Model Master Metalizers on bare plastic. I masked around the hot section and sprayed various layers and shades of metalizers to get an uneven finish and finished it off with Tamiya weathering powders and Crayola water colors for a wash. After all that was done, I attached the stabilators, vertical stabilizers and all the other delicate bits like the landing gear, pitot tubes, missiles and such.

Though it wasn't without its fit problems and warpages, I did enjoy building this kit and I would like to do another one where I upgrade the cockpit and improve on the missiles.  Sukhoi makes a pretty airplane, and with a little aftermarket help and some patience around the intake trunks, this Academy kit can be turned into a real showstopper. Thanks for looking!

CHEERS!

Ramon R. Lomeli

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Photos and text © by Ramon R. Lomeli