Brickie's Early MiG

[Brickie]

So, I've got the Trumpeter 1/48 kit thanks to a fortuitous eBay find and am hoping to do it in the markings of Sigmund Jähn, the first German in space. There is a Revell kit of this but for some reason it went out of production quite quickly and now goes for silly money on eBay.

There's an excellent and extensive review of the Trumpeter kit over at Britmodeller, so I'll link that here for anyone interested. You certainly get an impressive amount of stuff in the box including "rubber" main wheel tyres, and a little fret of PE.

The decal options with the kit are for NMF birds of the Soviet, Chinese, North Vietnamese, Finnish or Czechoslovakian air forces, and a camouflaged East German one. Jähn's MiG as represented in the Revell kit was NMF, with a nose code of "737", so I'm going to see if I can source a decal for that. Otherwise I might go with the Chinese one as it's got funky writing on it.

[Old_Tonto]

Looking forward to your build Brickie.

I have built the Revell kit and it was a little gem. Such a shame its not available any more.

[Brickie]

A free afternoon spent painting, assembling and - almost unbelievably - not losing any small parts, has led to an assembled nose wheel well and cockpit tub. As discussed, I've gone on the basis that I believe early MiG-21s had a range of cockpit colours including greys.

There's a resin cockpit for this kit by NeOmega but for the casual builder like me the contents of the kit are perfectly good. All fits together perfectly well and I'm only hoping I don't botch the rest of the build...

[TobyC]

That's a good start.

[Dazzled]

Excellent start Brickie. A very nice office indeed.

But shouldn't it be Avocado?

[Brickie]

One oddity about this otherwise very well engineered kit is that the tailplanes are simply butt-jointed on, and the wings only have a couple of little pins as if they were pylons.

However, there is a drill point inside the rear fuselage so I've opened this out, drilled a corresponding hole in the tailplanes and stuck a bit of cocktail stick in there to give a little extra grip.


Before and after drilling shots


Holding the tail on to mark the spot for tail drilling


Cocktail stick spikes

So now we start inserting all the bits into the fuselage. Nicely engineered tab-and-slot fixings for them, so I've affixed them to one side, then taped the fuselage sides together to make sure they sit straight.





And finally, here's a look with all the bits inserted. Does anyone have a good image source for the gribblies "under the hood" forward of the HUD set? If I can get them looking good, I might have the bonnet open.

[ShaunW]

Neomega produce some really excellent cockpit sets but I have to say that the detail on this kit, OOB, is more than adequate. A great start Brickie. Sorry but I don't have any ideas regarding views "under the hood" other than to say try Google Images, which I am finding increasingly to be a very useful reference tool in the absence of suitable printed works (my reference library is pitiful and requires significant investment).

[Dazzled]

I'll check my references, but I don't think I have anything. You could have a look at this http://www.cybermodeler.com/aircraft/mi ... _all.shtml as there are some excellent walk rounds or, like Shaun says, have a peruse of Google images.

[Brickie]

Just not sure what to actually search for on Google...

[Dazzled]

I tried "Mig-21 open access doors" and found this http://www.hyperscale.com/features/2001/mig21tc_1.htm

[Brickie]

My camera lost a few photos of the intermediate stages, but noseweight is in, she's all zipped up and given a spray of Humbrol Chrome Silver. Shiny. Very very shiny.



This is going to be a brand-new aircraft, the pride of the air force, buffed up to a lovely shine.

[ShaunW]

That is looking good and very shiny Brickie.

[Chris]

Your build is looking good.

[Brickie]

Having failed to source any generic bort numbers (as I gather they're called), I think I'm going to do the Chinese version because it's got funky writing on it, because Trumpy are a Chinese operation and because I've never done a Chinese one.

[TobyC]

Very shiny. Good work.