The Yak-38 is, for those who don't know, the Soviet equivalent of the Harrier GR.1. And like the British aircraft it is a lot of fuselage with not a lot of wing. Pretty much all the detailing work on this kit will be centred on the fuselage so that's the place where I started this afternoon.
An hour or so of sanding and testing whilst watching the F1 gave me two fairly matched fuselage halves, once I was happy with each half I turned my attention to the large engine intakes which are a very distinctive feature of the aircraft.
Like most vacforms the kit doesn't feature cut outs for intakes and exhausts so the first step was to make some rough cuts to remove the majority of the waste plastic:
Then the blow in auxiliary doors were opened up with a needle file:
The rough intake holes were enlarged and shaped by eye (comparing to photo's) using several different shaped files until they looked about right:
Now I could have left them at that stage as they looked much better than blank plastic but I didn't fancy a see through airframe so I needed to scratch some intake trunking. To do this I cut some 10 thou plasticard rectangles and then formed them round the end of a paintbrush. Using different diameter brushes let me match the curves of the reshaped intakes:
These were then glued into the intakes on the fuselage and left to cure. Once they are solid I'll trim off the excess and move onto the splitter plates to complete the intakes:
I also need to cut out the nose gear doors, make a nosegear bay, cut out the cockpit, build a cockpit and cut out the exhaust mountings. Maybe then I can close up the fuselage
Regards
Tom
I'm currently out of work (7 weeks and counting) and all my efforts are going into finding a new job. As you can imagine ,my modelling mojo is pretty much non-existent at present but I hope that it'll return soon.