Alex

Started on my strategy to mount the cowl onto the engine. First step was to drill the prop and the engine for 1/16" brass rod. This will enable a much more solid mount of prop to engine when it's all finally assembled. Yes, I could have filled the sink marks on the back of the prop, but it will be pressed right up against the cowl opening so only the plug wires will be able to see them... I then made this simple jig. The brass rod centers the engine, and the recessed area around it allows the nose of the engine to sit down in to achieve the right depth relative to the cowl, which slides down around the styrene disc. The marker line is just a visual aid to make sure that "up" is set the same way on engine and cowl. Cowl goes on like this Then the engine drops in With the two pieces held securely in the proper relation to each other, I can glue some connections between the backs of the cylinders and the sides of the cowl. But first I need to decide how I'm going to represent the support struts that run from the front of the engine housing to the inside front of the cowl (these will be much too thin to be my structural solution, unfortunately, they're just for accuracy's sake.

I think it's fair to say that the SU-57 exists-ish. The first examples have deployed to active units as of the end of last year, but it's not clear that the Russians have the budget to build and sustain a significant fleet of fighters of this level of sophistication. It may end up dead-ended even faster than the late, lamented F-22.

I'm noodling on trying to scratchbuild a 1:144 Falcon-9. I've been wanting to get into 3-D printing, and it seems like that might be a good way to make some of the non-cylindrical parts like the landing legs. We'll see if I actually get motivated to try it.

Beautiful job! And interesting to see - I had not realized that was a 4-person aircraft. Must get stuffy on long missions....

Thanks guys! I'm pleased with how it's coming together so far. I still need to make some final decisions about which aircraft I'm committing to doing and how weathered it's going to be. But I've got a week at least to ponder that - whatever it is starts with a good all-over aluminum finish.

Did the wing-to-fuselage glue-up. I had to introduce just a bit of tension by strapping a piece of tape between the wingtips across the top of the plane, so I left it to set up fully for 24 hours before removing the tape. The goal was to get the upper surfaces to match as tightly as possible, leaving any mismatch in the parts to come out on the bottom of the model. This strategy paid off on the starboard side especially: Which just needed some light trim/sand to remove plastic that squeezed out from the glue line - no filler at all. The port side needed a bit of CA to fill it. I've almost stopped using anything else as a filler - the combination of bonding strength and ability to sand it smooth makes CA glue unmatched, in my mind, for most "putty" scenarios. Given what the initial dry fit looked like, I'm pretty happy that this was the *worse* of the two sides. Of course, that left the underside to deal with, which had significant gaps/steps at both front and back. I have finally gotten past the impulse to "sneak up" on these things with fine-grit sanding. It takes a long time and often results in smooth but stepped surfaces. Instead I've reverted to my woodworking basics and learned to start with a "stock removal" tool - in this case a (very) small rasp. The gap at bottom is filled with CA - but the stuff is clear so it is sometimes hard to see. You can see at top the state of the forward part, with CA glue applied and hardened, but no smoothing yet. As I've learned by reading on LSP, it's critical to attack this CA fill process quickly - I add glue, catalyze it immediately with "zip kicker", and file/sand away. It is solid but not fully hard for 30-60 minutes and much easier to work in that state than it is the next day, for example. While the stuff is still semi-hardened, it's a pretty quick job to go from rasp through various sanding sticks to a pretty smooth surface (through 1000-grit in this shot): You can see at the bottom of the photo that the starboard trailing edge of the wing/root join still needs a touch more fill, which I subsequently added. This is the front end smoothed out and with destroyed surface detail restored. I think I need to still do a bit more smoothing on the fronts of the wings to fully level out the join. But it's close. Once I'm happy with it I'll wet sand the whole thing with 3200, 4000, and then 6000 grit to get a uniform surface tooth, clean the living heck out of it, and see what a coat of Mr Color Gloss Black looks like.

Those exhaust nozzles look great! Nice work!

Thanks guys. I’m enjoying the mini airline shelf as it grows. There are at least a half dozen more waiting in the wings, although none as small/quick/simple as the Yak-40.

Here it is among the fleet. It really is a tiny airplane, especially for a passenger jet.

And that's a wrap. I made a little bit of trouble for myself by starting the decal process with the cockpit windows. Lacking any engraved detail on the model indicating where the windows were located, I managed to get it on a bit lower than it should be, which had knock on consequences for the other decals that ran to the front of the plane. But overall I think it's not too noticeable. I think it looks OK at shelf range, which is all it needs to do as a 3-day project to add one more member to the growing 1:144 civil air fleet in my office. One thing that's obvious from the completed model is that the main gear legs are overscale not only in general chunkiness but also in length - the back of the plane sits too high.

Super result! The pastel weathering looks great on the metallic finish, and the overall effect is just awesome from every angle. You keep raising the bar with every project...

Well, dubious kit it might be, but it looks like you got a nice result out of it. The AZ Model kit is no worse than you would expect for an inexpensive short run kit. I also have their IL-18 kit, which on brief inspection looks likely to be more of a slog.

Derek, unfortunately the version of the kit that I have does not include the Olympic livery. It has two Aeroflot schemes and one Air Libya. I wonder if there’s an aftermarket decal sheet that covers it?

I'm going to cut away the decal film where it overlays the flat spot that the nacelle mounts to before I wet the decal. So I will be gluing onto the paint layer at least (and it's Mr Color lacquer, so it is *stuck* to the plastic). As soon as I thought about this I saw the decal film peeling off under the weight of that nacelle....

OK, back in the saddle after a bit of a digression into civil air stuff... One of the last steps on prepping the wing subassembly is letting in the wingtip running lights. These are provided as clear parts in the kit, but you have to saw out the relevant part of the wingtip to make room for them. Of course, the molded-in line denoting the place to cut was placed differently on the top and bottom wing sections... I had cut these off the clear sprue early on and painted then with clear red and clear blue (the IJN did green starboard lights by putting a yellow bulb under blue glass). At the time I did not notice that they were not identical, but in fact had a subtle handedness to them. I had a 50:50 chance of getting the right color on the right one just by chance, but of course... After removing the paint from them with thinner I repainted them in the correct color and installed them using PVA glue. The surface looks a bit grotty because I've already painted over the "glass" part with masking fluid. The next major operation to tackle was the cowl. As I noted earlier, it was my hope to modify it to allow the cooling flaps to be flared, as is often seen on these aircraft when they are sitting around the airfield, for instance: The kit provided the cowl with the flaps molded closed (in very thick plastic, like the whole kit). My goal was to do a subtle flare, enough to be noticeable without opening them so much as to invite peering in the see that there are no engine bearers or other details behind the engine. I decided to try and do this with the kit plastic, rather than committing (gulp) to cutting the cowl apart and making them out of sheet metal. After gluing the cowl pieces up and cleaning up the seam, I re-scribed the lines demarcating the flaps from each other and the forward part of the cowl, making them quite a bit deeper than they started. (Sorry for lack of in-progress photos - I was on a roll) I then carefully ground down the backs of the flaps to make them thinner, then razor-sawed the lines dividing the individual flaps from each other. Then, having the ends of those sawn slots as a guide, I used a ball-head grinding tool on my little motor tool to carefully grind away *almost* all of the material from the inside of the cowl in back of the line where the flaps were to hinge (and finally remembered to take a picture): That photo shows (obviously) the effect after I set the thing flaps-down in boiling water to soften it and then gently bent the flaps outward. Here it is from the other side: Not too bad for an hour's effort. remaking them from scratch definitely would have taken longer. After some clean-up sanding, I went ahead and sprayed it with black Mr Surfacer, expecting to find a bunch more flaws to correct. But it looked surprisingly OK, so I went ahead and shot it with Mr Color C-125 "Cowling Color" (a very dark blue-black). Of course, doing this with the flaps meant eliminating the means that Special Hobby engineered to attach the cowl to the fuselage, so now I have to figure out how I'm going to manage that. Fortunately, it *should* be pretty straightforward (famous last words). Unlike some SH kits, the attachment of the engine to the fuselage is robust and positive on this kit. So I just need to build a jig that will allow me to hold the engine centered and in plane with the cowl while I glue some scrap plastic brackets from the backs/tops of the cylinders to the inside of the cowl, then just glue the engine on and let the cowl float around it. I have a pretty clear idea how to do this. I'm also starting to think about fudging up some engine bearers, which I should stop thinking about, because this model is almost done! The next major construction step (and really the last such major step) is to join up the wings to the fuselage and sort out the seams. Then I need to do a bit more work on the undersides of the tailplanes, and it's off to the paint shop! Barring that, there's the windscreen to polish, Future, mask, and paint. The gunsight. And attaching a few fiddly bits like the bombs and drop tank, which I've already built and painted. Really pretty close now.

This is going to be a very small build thread, as befits a very small (and simple) model. I have a bad habit, during boring Zoom meetings, of surfing eBay for short-run kits of obscure aviation subjects. As a result, I have a growing stack of such kits, most originating in eastern Europe, which is apparently the epicenter of such things. While trying to rekindle my enthusiasm for the current 1:32 warbird build, I started pulling these down and inspecting the contents. This one seemed so simple that I thought I could throw it together in a couple of days before coming to grips with "serious modeling" again. In one of the supplied Aeroflot liveries, it would make a nice sidekick to my recently finished Ilyushin-62M. Interestingly, I could not find a photo on line that precisely matched the painting directions for any of the three supplied schemes. I'm aiming for something like this aircraft: This is the lowest parts-count kit I've ever done. But the decal sheet is actually very nice. The landing gear in particular are only "suggestive" in form, although with a scalpel and a file and some time I was able to make them a bit better. The front gear is molded all of a piece, wheel, tire, and all, so I had to dust off some brush-painting "skills". Regardless, I put it together mainly aiming at having what Kev has called a "platform for decals" rather than a detailed model. Especially on the ill-fitting undersides, I did not attempt to restore erased (overscale) panel lines or anything like that. Here it is painted up: I'm going to attach the side engine nacelles after doing the decals, rather than trying to wrap the cheat line decal around the nacelle pylon.

That’s a nice trick, drawing on the vinyl for registration to the model. I’m definitely going to use that. Your model is looking superb, too!

Ain’t that always the case.

Remind me what scheme you are doing with these decals? I have this kit but hadn’t thought beyond just doing the scheme that came in the box...

Thanks for that - very interesting. It seems like the different ways of adapting to the (forced?) decision to use the aft-engine design (tail prop versus very large horizontal stabilizer) do make them different in pretty fundamental ways.

What are the key differences, do you think, between the two? To look at the basic specs, they seem pretty similar (size, number of passengers, power, range...). But I'm far from an expert on these things.

The fuselage was done with Tamiya gloss white right out of the spray can. It levels extremely well, by dint of having a lot of solvent in it. For that reason, it is also hard to get it to be opaque over any small ridge or groove in the surface - it tends to flow away and let the color underneath show. I primed this model with white and still had a bit of trouble with that (primer had the same tendency). Next time around I will supplement the white aerosol primer with some targeted applications of white Mr Surfacer using the airbrush to make sure that I have a really dense white primer coat. the VC10 would be an apt comparison - maybe I’ll need to add a copy of the Roden kit to the stash. What’s one more at this point...?

I almost ran into a real problem here at the final step. I decided to try out (need to remember to ALWAYS test on scrap first) using MRP lacquer as the final clearcoat over the decals. Fortunately I applied it to the bottom first. One of the LU registration code decals bubbled/lifted in a few places almost immediately. Not in a huge way, but noticeably. So for the top of the model I went right back to my usual - Vallejo acrylic clear. I usually mix about 2/3 gloss and 1/3 flat for "new" looking aircraft like this (I would use pure flat for a camo warbird). This worked fine, as always, and it looks like I'm going to be sticking to at least one water-based paint for the foreseeable. One aspect of this build that I'm not super-happy with is the cockpit glass. I used the Silhouette to make yellow kabuki tape masks for the individual panes, but the base white coat I used slipped under them in places (and then sealed them, I suppose, since no blue went under). This hasn't happened in the past, and I'm not sure if it's to do with the masking material, or the specific paint, or what. I thought briefly of using the LU cockpit window decal to cover them, but figured the added texture of the painted window frames would likely make that look ratty. I've been happy in the past with the look of decal windscreens (like on my DC-4), but it looks strange to my eye to have decal cockpit windows when I have real transparent windows for the passenger cabin (you can see the Krystal Klear still drying on some of them in the photo). I really, really prefer the look (and simplicity) of using KK for kits where the passenger cabin windows are molded open. Perversely, I really like using decals, too, but only IF the kit comes with a smooth, windowless fuselage so I don't have to wrestle with filling all those holes. I have often considered the possibility of carefully drilling and filing out the cockpit windows on the clear plastic insert on one of these kits so that I could make those windows out of Krystal Klear too, but it seems like it would be easy to screw up doing such an operation, and even if successful, easy to damage the part afterwards. I guess for now I'm just going to remain conflicted on this, but for sure I find the cockpit glass to be the single hardest part of airliner kits. I was a bit nervous too about setting the model on its "feet" for the first time, too. Zvezda did a very good job of molding the landing gear to scale (unlike your classic super-chunky Minicraft kit), and the front gear in particular look delicate. Add to this the fact that I probably (OK definitely) went overboard putting weight in the nose, and I was worried that the nose gear might not be up to the task. But, as is obvious from these photos, no problems ensued. Here's the underside. And here it is placed among its airliner brethren on the shelf I finally put up over my desk to get some of my models out of the basement. The angle of this photo kind of conceals how much bigger it is than the 737 - it's half again as long and wide. I'm now conflicted on what to start next. I need to keep up momentum on the current 1:32 warbird build, but I have almost a dozen interesting 1:144 civil air subjects on the shelf now, including a few obscure smaller Soviet-era civil transports from various eastern European outfits like A Model (e.g. a Czech Airlines IL-18 turboprop) and a Lockheed L-1011 tri-jet from Eastern Express (I had to give them a try). I also finally got hold of a 1:144 DC-3 kit (which was surprisingly difficult to do - the 1:100 Doyusha kit is everywhere, but I want all of these civil air subjects to be the same scale, darn it). Decisions, decisions.

This is very cool and different. What's the scale / how tall is the figurine?

So that was a bit of a weekend decal marathon. Zvezda is nothing if not comprehensive in their coverage of stencils for this kit - more than 60 individual decals with more than 100 total little outlines, shapes, and text placards to apply. But it sure adds to the realism of the thing. The Liveries Unlimited decals also worked great. One of the nice things about that sheet (versus the kit decals) is that they supply the door outlines as separate elements from the stripes, so if you choose to paint the stripes, as I did, you can still easily use the decal doors. My painted stripes aren't the *exact* right width to mesh with the door outlines, but close enough that your eye sort of fills in the gap. I'm going to let it fully dry overnight and then see where it may need a little MicroSol persuasion. The IL-62M had the most complicated wing walk stenciling of any aircraft I've ever seen. Ten decals per wing just to get that on (plus a bunch of little placard decals and the registration number). It sure adds some visual pop, though. Today I got an interesting look at just how iconic this plane was in the Soviet Union in its day. My wife (she's in her mid-50s like me) grew up in Moscow and did not move to the States until shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1986. She has very little knowledge of or interest in either civil or military aviation (she knows that the planes with the red circles on the wings are the Japanese ones, but that's about it). Today I showed her the paper insert from the Liveries Unlimited decal set that has the illustrations of the different schemes applied to the plane, and she immediately, like without hesitation, said "Oh yeah, that's an Ilyushin 62. I flew in one of those." So it made an impression in its homeland for sure.