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Undersize Trump. MiG-21 MF Fuselage?


Alain Gadbois

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Hello all!

 

Having recently purchased the 1/32 Trumpeter MiG-21 MF kit, I started to compare it with my 1/48 Eduard MF, just to see if fuselage dimensions were similar after enlarging them 150%.

I noticed the front fuselage was off and turned to a good scale plan and published dimensions of the fuselage length. The plan is from Wings and Wheels Publications and more dimensions came from

the Docavia #33 on the MiG design bureau and has much information.

 

Photos show the problem. The nose is short 8mm. It also looks shrunken.

 

PsbMvqO.jpg

 

The error is all in the front fuselage starting at the dark vertical pencil line. The airbrake is OK, but the auxiliary air intake below the leading edge is 4mm too far back, and all ads up to 8mm total.

 

gq2ShaD.jpg

 

I decided to check the diameter of the intake opening and found it also too small. The diameter should be 870mm, or 27.2mm in 1/32. This is represented by the circle drawn in the center of the photo.

on the right is the same circle with the diameter of the Trump part drawn within it to show the difference easily.

 

CTNAtZN.jpg

 

I wonder if anyone has noticed this before and if so, what you may have done to correct this, as it does seem to me to make a difference in the look of the finished model.

 

Thank you in advance for your observations and remarks!

 

Alain

Edited by Alain Gadbois
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Well now I know what I have to do with the nose of the remaining sections of the fuselage of a Revell PF that lost its spine to change my Trumpeter MF into a PFM... :-(

 

Thanks very much for the eagle eye. I will have a look at the sets of plan I own as I have somewhere a book of 1/48th plans. 

 

Thierry 

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Hello,

do you really trust those drawings? Trumpeter is not the most reliable about accuracy but many drawings are even worse, some of the worst problem in the Trumpeter kit happened because they based the kit on wrong available drawings. My suggestion is to check the fuselage against pictures of the real aircraft and compare the overall shape and the relative positions of details. You can't easily get measurements from a picture because there are always distortions, but a good straight lateral image can give more useful informations about the real plane. Drawings are a rapresentations of reality and checking a kit against them is like comparing kits of the same subject from different manufacturers.

About your drawings:

are you sure the drawings are in the right scale?

You correctly said that 1/48 enlarged at 150% gives 1/32 but:

- is your original drawing in a perfect and uniform 1/48 scale?

- is your scanner/printer so accurate to give precise and constant enlargement?

Looking at your pictures the drawing and the half-fuselage seems to be in slight different scale, I don't know which one is the correct 1/32, but the drawing looks larger than the kit.

Try to print another copy of the drawing with a little less enlargement (149 or 148%) in order to get the best possible match between the kit part and th drawing and start from there.

It may seems odd, but I believe is the better way to go if you don't want to completely modify the whole kit.

Then comparing the drawing with pictures I have some considerations but I'm not really sure:

- the nose seems to drop down a little too much and the upper looks too curved

- if the wing root is correctly aligned,, the kit auxiliary side intake is in a better position than the drawing

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Hi guys!

Thank you for all the feedback!

 

Thierry, I would be curious to know if the Revell kit is close to the correct dimensions. As an older kit made when any information from across the Iron Curtain was very hard to come by, I decided not to consider it, plus I do not have one to check out of curiosity.

 

Hal 9001 (great name!), thank you for the extensive response. For the fact that the Trump kit comes up short, I used official MiG dimensions. I did not use this drawing for anything but the dimensions.

 

O5xx7OO.jpg 

 

The length of the fuselage is 12 285mm excluding the nose cone and tail plane. In 1/32 this comes to 383.9mm. This is the only information I need to demonstrate the kit is wrong. The WW plan was about 1mm short in 1/48 so it is not bad, and I only used it as an easy way to compare to the kit parts. I noticed the hump was much smaller in the kit that the drawing and this gives the impression that the plan is too large...All that will have to be checked further. The examination of the Eduard kit and the plan points to the front of the kit for the problem. Real measurements from a MiG-21 would help of course!

 

I agree that photos, taken from a distance can be a lot of help. It can keep you in the ball park as to the relative size of components, even some measurements and angles can be taken if you keep in mind that distortion will affect anything away from the center of the photo.

 

The intake opening of 870mm is also from MiG and this also shows a problem with the nose section.

 

Alain

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I always thought the Trumpeter MiG-21 looked OK "as-is". Not necessarily perfect in the detailing area, but still quite acceptable. For various reasons, I view all drawings as somewhat suspect, even manufacturer generated stuff, which can also be wrong.

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The WWP drawings aren't perfect, but the overall dimensions and proportions are way more accurate than one might suspect.

 

The specific dimensions available via various MiG-21 aerodynamics/systems handbooks are reliable. When checked against the "real thing", the deviations are virtually negligible. (Back in 2014, we made 3D object scans, using both stationary and hand-held devices, of a MiG-21MF, bis, a MiG-23MF and an MLA)

 

Edited by Ivan Ivanovich
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