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The kit and its assembly:
I am not a big F-16 fan, but in some cases it’s an unavoidable canvas – just like in this case here. This fictional aircraft model (or better: this model of a [yet] fictional F-16 operator) was spawned by two ideas. One was the simple question: what if the Ukraine had after the USSR’s dissolution chosen a stronger attachment to (old) Western forces after the dissolution of the USSSR? And/or: what if the Ukraine had started to procure non-Russian equipment, esp. aircraft? So, what would an Ukrainian F-16 might have looked like, in general but esp. after the Crimea annexation in 2014 when such a scenario had become even more possible?
The other source of inspiration was a picture of an Ukrainian Su-24 with grey digital camouflage, a scheme that was/is also worn by some Su-25s. When I stumbled upon an Authentic Decals sheet for this unique paint scheme that allows to apply the complex and delicate pattern through water-slide transfers, I thought that the relatively “flat” F-16 surface would be an ideal basis to try this stunt?
What sounded like a very simple livery whif on an OOB model turned into a construction nightmare. Originally, this project provided me with a purpose for a dubious Trumpeter F-16 kit that I had bought some years ago – dead cheap, but righteously so. This kit is cruel, the model even has no concrete variant specification and is apparently the re-boxing of a kit from an obscure Chinese company called “Income”. Effectively, the Trumpeter F-16 is a rip-off of Italeri’s quite nice F-16C/D kit – but the Income/Trumpeter clone comes with MUCH deeper engravings esp. on the fuselage that remind a lot of the dreaded Matchbox “trenches”. Everything is rather “soft” and toylike, the clear parts are poor and the (few) decals look like toy stickers (!!!). I’d call it crude, even the instructions are apparently poor scans or photocopies from the Italeri kit, including hints for detail painting with no corresponding reference what colors should be used at all… All that could have been overlooked, but after starting with the kit I could not commit myself to use it any further. It’s rare that I give up because of a kit’s basis!
Next idea to “save” the project’s idea of an Ukrainian F-16 was to dig out a surplus Intech F-16 from the pile, also bought long ago because it was cheap, as conversion fodder. This kit has also been re-released in infinite variations under the Mister-/Mastercraft label. Upon closer inspection this kit turned out to have massive flaws, too, but in different areas from the Trumpeter thing. For instance, the Intech kit’s wings are utterly thick, certainly 1mm thicker than the Trumpeter model’s parts. This does not sound much, but on the really thin F-16 wings and stabilizers this looks really awful! Furthermore, the clear parts had not been fully molded, so I’d have needed a replacement canopy, anyway. Again, I gave up on building…
…until I decided to make the best of this mess and combine the “best” parts from both gimp models, trying to mend the worst flaws to an acceptable level. This led to the glorious kitbashing that this model eventually became! From the Intech kit I took the acceptable fuselage, including cockpit interior, air intake and landing gear, as well as the fin and the weapon pylons. The Trumpeter kit donated its thinner wings and the stabilizers, as well as the much better open exhaust nozzle (there’s an optional closed one, too; the Intech kit only offers an open nozzle, without ANY surface detail at all, it’s just a blank pipe!).
Beyond these basic ingredients, some more donors became necessary: All clear parts from both Intech and Trumpeter kit turned out to be rubbish for various reasons. The decision to build an F-16D two-seater was dictated by the fact that I had a leftover canopy from an Italeri F-16 kit in the donor bank – luckily it fitted well to the Intech kit’s body. Two crewmen from the spares box populate the cockpit and hide the rather basic interior, which was not improved at all. Furthermore, the ordnance came from external sources, too. The characteristic drop tanks with their cut-off tails were also leftover parts from the Italeri F-16, all AAMs come from a Hasegawa weapon set.
Some PSR was necessary to blend the parts from different kits together – thankfully, almost all F-16 kits are constructed in a similar fashion, even though there are small detail differences. In this case, the wings had to be slightly modified to fit onto the Intech fuselage. However, even those parts from the original kit(s) that are supposed to fit, e.g. the fin or the alternative cockpit opening frames for the optional single- and two-seater canopies, do hardly match at all. Horrible.
I rather focused on the model’s exterior, and a personal addition to improve the overall look of the otherwise rather basic/poor model, I added some small blade antennae that were totally missing on either model. Another extra detail are the small static dischargers on the trailing edges, created with thin, heated sprue material. Only small details, but they improve IMHO the model’s look considerably.
We had the pleasure of working with Rusty Malinoski to make this one of a kind #customseadek kit for his 2018 MasterCraft X-Star. Big thanks to our friends at Hyperlite for sending us these photos! Photo: @rodrigosmaps
Find a SeaDek Certified Fabricator or Installer near you at www.seadek.com/customseadek.aspx
I've known of Mastercraft Garage in Branston since the days of being a teenager, but only this year I'd noticed the tank ventilators at end end of the garage.
I do believe that recently there was a change of ownership so whilst on a break at work I paid a visit to me
and met the new owner.
He confirmed that this had been a petrol station but a long time ago but did contact the former owner who confirmed that the garage stopped selling petrol back in the 1970's although the brand couldn't be remembered.
The garage is unchanged all throughout the street view era but I don't think the garage has changed much in over thirty years.
www.google.com/maps/place/Mastercraft/@53.1951001,-0.4763...
***UPDATE*** Welcome back Sam. Cheers!
Measurements 42 inches wide x 24 inches deep x 25 inches high. Expandable top open 59.5 inches long.
The kit and its assembly:
This is a what-if model, but, as usual, it is rooted in reality – to be precise in the German late-war plans to mate the Ta 152(H) with the mighty Jumo 222 engine. I do not know what the official service designation would have been, but this combo would have resulted in a powerful fighter – AFAIK, German engineers’ calculations indicated a performance that would have been comparable with the post-WWII F4U-5!
Creating a model of such this paper aircraft called for some serious conversion work and ended almost in a kitbashing. The starting point became a (cheap) Mistercraft Fw 190D-9 kit, and I originally planned this model to be a Fw 190 variant, but eventually this turned into a Ta 152, since it would better match up with the late war time frame.
The Mastercraft/Mistercraft kit appears to be an indigenous mold and not a re-issue of a vintage kit. At first glance the parts look pretty crisp, but the kit has some serious fit and flash issues. Another selling point is the detailed decal set, which comes in three sheets and encompasses a lot of stencils – even though the instructions where to place them are not consistent, and there are even 1:48 scale(!) markings included. But that’s a Mastercraft/Mistercraft standard, anyway…
Well, the basis was sound and the kit would, in any event, be thoroughly modified. From the OOB kit, fuselage, wings and stabilizers were taken, as well as the landing gear and some other bits.
The wings were extended, in order to keep overall proportions with the new, much more massive engine cowling balanced (see below). Not an easy stunt, but I was lucky to have recently bought a set of resin Doppelreiter tanks from Airmodel which were just perfect to cover the cuts and seams on the upper wing surfaces. Inside of the wings, a styrene strip secured stability while the lower wing surface was sculpted with putty and the trailing edge of the outer wing panels was cut down by 1 mm, so that the wings’ outlines match again. Some further PSR work was necessary to blend the slipper tanks into the wings, forming the upper side of the modifications, but in the end the whole thing looks quite good.
The fuselage lost both its original engine and the tail. The latter is a donor part from a Frog Ta 152H (Revell re-boxing), but mating it with the Mistercraft Fw 190D was not easy because the fuselage shapes of the two kits are totally different! I also used the Mistercraft stabilizers because they were markedly bigger than the same parts from the Ta 152 kit!
The Jumo 222 front end was simulated with parts from the spares box, and it is a bit exaggerated. Actually, the Jumo 222 was hardly bigger (in both length and diameter) than the Fw 190D’s Jumo 213 V12 engine! The cowling and the radiator for my conversion came from a Frog He 219 engine nacelle (Revell re-boxing, too) which is utterly dubious. The nacelle parts were turned upside down and integrated into the slender Fw 190 front fuselage with several layers of putty.
Inside of the cowling, a radiator plate from an Italeri Fw 190D was mounted, together with a styrene tube adapter for the new propeller. The latter was scratched, using a drop tank as spinner and single propeller blades from the Mistercraft Fw 190D, plus one donor blade from the Frog Ta 152H kit, which had to be trimmed in order to match the other blades. But with some paint, no one will tell the small differences…
Once the bigger engine was integrated into the fuselage, the exhaust system had to be added. In real life, the Jumo 222 would have featured three clusters with two rows of four exhaust stubs, distributed evenly around the cowling. Using a drawing of this arrangement as benchmark, I started with square cuts for the cluster openings. From the back side, styrene sheet closed the gaps and offered a basis for the exhaust stubs. These were improvised with H0 scale roofing shingles – each of the 24 exhaust stubs was cut individually into shape and size and then glued into the respective openings on the upper flanks and under the engine. Finally, styrene sheet was used to create small spoilers and heat shields. The result is certainly not perfect, but comes close to what the real world arrangement would basically have looked like. In a final step, two air intakes for the two-stage supercharger, scratched from sprue material, were added to the flanks.
The cockpit remained OOB, simple as it is, as well as the landing gear, but the canopy was modified in order to allow a presentation in open position. This meant that the OOB canopy had to be cut in two parts and that the model’s spine had to be cut away, making place for a donor canopy (the late, bulged variant, IIRC from an Italeri Fw 190D-9). Internally the fuselage gap was filled with putty and the headrest had to be modified, too, but the conversion turned out to look better than expected.
As a small cosmetic improvement, the molded gun barrel stumps in the wing roots were replaced with hollow steel needles, and the outer guns were completely removed.
The kit and its assembly:
This is a what-if model, but, as usual, it is rooted in reality – to be precise in the German late-war plans to mate the Ta 152(H) with the mighty Jumo 222 engine. I do not know what the official service designation would have been, but this combo would have resulted in a powerful fighter – AFAIK, German engineers’ calculations indicated a performance that would have been comparable with the post-WWII F4U-5!
Creating a model of such this paper aircraft called for some serious conversion work and ended almost in a kitbashing. The starting point became a (cheap) Mistercraft Fw 190D-9 kit, and I originally planned this model to be a Fw 190 variant, but eventually this turned into a Ta 152, since it would better match up with the late war time frame.
The Mastercraft/Mistercraft kit appears to be an indigenous mold and not a re-issue of a vintage kit. At first glance the parts look pretty crisp, but the kit has some serious fit and flash issues. Another selling point is the detailed decal set, which comes in three sheets and encompasses a lot of stencils – even though the instructions where to place them are not consistent, and there are even 1:48 scale(!) markings included. But that’s a Mastercraft/Mistercraft standard, anyway…
Well, the basis was sound and the kit would, in any event, be thoroughly modified. From the OOB kit, fuselage, wings and stabilizers were taken, as well as the landing gear and some other bits.
The wings were extended, in order to keep overall proportions with the new, much more massive engine cowling balanced (see below). Not an easy stunt, but I was lucky to have recently bought a set of resin Doppelreiter tanks from Airmodel which were just perfect to cover the cuts and seams on the upper wing surfaces. Inside of the wings, a styrene strip secured stability while the lower wing surface was sculpted with putty and the trailing edge of the outer wing panels was cut down by 1 mm, so that the wings’ outlines match again. Some further PSR work was necessary to blend the slipper tanks into the wings, forming the upper side of the modifications, but in the end the whole thing looks quite good.
The fuselage lost both its original engine and the tail. The latter is a donor part from a Frog Ta 152H (Revell re-boxing), but mating it with the Mistercraft Fw 190D was not easy because the fuselage shapes of the two kits are totally different! I also used the Mistercraft stabilizers because they were markedly bigger than the same parts from the Ta 152 kit!
The Jumo 222 front end was simulated with parts from the spares box, and it is a bit exaggerated. Actually, the Jumo 222 was hardly bigger (in both length and diameter) than the Fw 190D’s Jumo 213 V12 engine! The cowling and the radiator for my conversion came from a Frog He 219 engine nacelle (Revell re-boxing, too) which is utterly dubious. The nacelle parts were turned upside down and integrated into the slender Fw 190 front fuselage with several layers of putty.
Inside of the cowling, a radiator plate from an Italeri Fw 190D was mounted, together with a styrene tube adapter for the new propeller. The latter was scratched, using a drop tank as spinner and single propeller blades from the Mistercraft Fw 190D, plus one donor blade from the Frog Ta 152H kit, which had to be trimmed in order to match the other blades. But with some paint, no one will tell the small differences…
Once the bigger engine was integrated into the fuselage, the exhaust system had to be added. In real life, the Jumo 222 would have featured three clusters with two rows of four exhaust stubs, distributed evenly around the cowling. Using a drawing of this arrangement as benchmark, I started with square cuts for the cluster openings. From the back side, styrene sheet closed the gaps and offered a basis for the exhaust stubs. These were improvised with H0 scale roofing shingles – each of the 24 exhaust stubs was cut individually into shape and size and then glued into the respective openings on the upper flanks and under the engine. Finally, styrene sheet was used to create small spoilers and heat shields. The result is certainly not perfect, but comes close to what the real world arrangement would basically have looked like. In a final step, two air intakes for the two-stage supercharger, scratched from sprue material, were added to the flanks.
The cockpit remained OOB, simple as it is, as well as the landing gear, but the canopy was modified in order to allow a presentation in open position. This meant that the OOB canopy had to be cut in two parts and that the model’s spine had to be cut away, making place for a donor canopy (the late, bulged variant, IIRC from an Italeri Fw 190D-9). Internally the fuselage gap was filled with putty and the headrest had to be modified, too, but the conversion turned out to look better than expected.
As a small cosmetic improvement, the molded gun barrel stumps in the wing roots were replaced with hollow steel needles, and the outer guns were completely removed.
The kit and its assembly:
I am not a big F-16 fan, but in some cases it’s an unavoidable canvas – just like in this case here. This fictional aircraft model (or better: this model of a [yet] fictional F-16 operator) was spawned by two ideas. One was the simple question: what if the Ukraine had after the USSR’s dissolution chosen a stronger attachment to (old) Western forces after the dissolution of the USSSR? And/or: what if the Ukraine had started to procure non-Russian equipment, esp. aircraft? So, what would an Ukrainian F-16 might have looked like, in general but esp. after the Crimea annexation in 2014 when such a scenario had become even more possible?
The other source of inspiration was a picture of an Ukrainian Su-24 with grey digital camouflage, a scheme that was/is also worn by some Su-25s. When I stumbled upon an Authentic Decals sheet for this unique paint scheme that allows to apply the complex and delicate pattern through water-slide transfers, I thought that the relatively “flat” F-16 surface would be an ideal basis to try this stunt?
What sounded like a very simple livery whif on an OOB model turned into a construction nightmare. Originally, this project provided me with a purpose for a dubious Trumpeter F-16 kit that I had bought some years ago – dead cheap, but righteously so. This kit is cruel, the model even has no concrete variant specification and is apparently the re-boxing of a kit from an obscure Chinese company called “Income”. Effectively, the Trumpeter F-16 is a rip-off of Italeri’s quite nice F-16C/D kit – but the Income/Trumpeter clone comes with MUCH deeper engravings esp. on the fuselage that remind a lot of the dreaded Matchbox “trenches”. Everything is rather “soft” and toylike, the clear parts are poor and the (few) decals look like toy stickers (!!!). I’d call it crude, even the instructions are apparently poor scans or photocopies from the Italeri kit, including hints for detail painting with no corresponding reference what colors should be used at all… All that could have been overlooked, but after starting with the kit I could not commit myself to use it any further. It’s rare that I give up because of a kit’s basis!
Next idea to “save” the project’s idea of an Ukrainian F-16 was to dig out a surplus Intech F-16 from the pile, also bought long ago because it was cheap, as conversion fodder. This kit has also been re-released in infinite variations under the Mister-/Mastercraft label. Upon closer inspection this kit turned out to have massive flaws, too, but in different areas from the Trumpeter thing. For instance, the Intech kit’s wings are utterly thick, certainly 1mm thicker than the Trumpeter model’s parts. This does not sound much, but on the really thin F-16 wings and stabilizers this looks really awful! Furthermore, the clear parts had not been fully molded, so I’d have needed a replacement canopy, anyway. Again, I gave up on building…
…until I decided to make the best of this mess and combine the “best” parts from both gimp models, trying to mend the worst flaws to an acceptable level. This led to the glorious kitbashing that this model eventually became! From the Intech kit I took the acceptable fuselage, including cockpit interior, air intake and landing gear, as well as the fin and the weapon pylons. The Trumpeter kit donated its thinner wings and the stabilizers, as well as the much better open exhaust nozzle (there’s an optional closed one, too; the Intech kit only offers an open nozzle, without ANY surface detail at all, it’s just a blank pipe!).
Beyond these basic ingredients, some more donors became necessary: All clear parts from both Intech and Trumpeter kit turned out to be rubbish for various reasons. The decision to build an F-16D two-seater was dictated by the fact that I had a leftover canopy from an Italeri F-16 kit in the donor bank – luckily it fitted well to the Intech kit’s body. Two crewmen from the spares box populate the cockpit and hide the rather basic interior, which was not improved at all. Furthermore, the ordnance came from external sources, too. The characteristic drop tanks with their cut-off tails were also leftover parts from the Italeri F-16, all AAMs come from a Hasegawa weapon set.
Some PSR was necessary to blend the parts from different kits together – thankfully, almost all F-16 kits are constructed in a similar fashion, even though there are small detail differences. In this case, the wings had to be slightly modified to fit onto the Intech fuselage. However, even those parts from the original kit(s) that are supposed to fit, e.g. the fin or the alternative cockpit opening frames for the optional single- and two-seater canopies, do hardly match at all. Horrible.
I rather focused on the model’s exterior, and a personal addition to improve the overall look of the otherwise rather basic/poor model, I added some small blade antennae that were totally missing on either model. Another extra detail are the small static dischargers on the trailing edges, created with thin, heated sprue material. Only small details, but they improve IMHO the model’s look considerably.
The kit and its assembly:
This is a what-if model, but, as usual, it is rooted in reality – to be precise in the German late-war plans to mate the Ta 152(H) with the mighty Jumo 222 engine. I do not know what the official service designation would have been, but this combo would have resulted in a powerful fighter – AFAIK, German engineers’ calculations indicated a performance that would have been comparable with the post-WWII F4U-5!
Creating a model of such this paper aircraft called for some serious conversion work and ended almost in a kitbashing. The starting point became a (cheap) Mistercraft Fw 190D-9 kit, and I originally planned this model to be a Fw 190 variant, but eventually this turned into a Ta 152, since it would better match up with the late war time frame.
The Mastercraft/Mistercraft kit appears to be an indigenous mold and not a re-issue of a vintage kit. At first glance the parts look pretty crisp, but the kit has some serious fit and flash issues. Another selling point is the detailed decal set, which comes in three sheets and encompasses a lot of stencils – even though the instructions where to place them are not consistent, and there are even 1:48 scale(!) markings included. But that’s a Mastercraft/Mistercraft standard, anyway…
Well, the basis was sound and the kit would, in any event, be thoroughly modified. From the OOB kit, fuselage, wings and stabilizers were taken, as well as the landing gear and some other bits.
The wings were extended, in order to keep overall proportions with the new, much more massive engine cowling balanced (see below). Not an easy stunt, but I was lucky to have recently bought a set of resin Doppelreiter tanks from Airmodel which were just perfect to cover the cuts and seams on the upper wing surfaces. Inside of the wings, a styrene strip secured stability while the lower wing surface was sculpted with putty and the trailing edge of the outer wing panels was cut down by 1 mm, so that the wings’ outlines match again. Some further PSR work was necessary to blend the slipper tanks into the wings, forming the upper side of the modifications, but in the end the whole thing looks quite good.
The fuselage lost both its original engine and the tail. The latter is a donor part from a Frog Ta 152H (Revell re-boxing), but mating it with the Mistercraft Fw 190D was not easy because the fuselage shapes of the two kits are totally different! I also used the Mistercraft stabilizers because they were markedly bigger than the same parts from the Ta 152 kit!
The Jumo 222 front end was simulated with parts from the spares box, and it is a bit exaggerated. Actually, the Jumo 222 was hardly bigger (in both length and diameter) than the Fw 190D’s Jumo 213 V12 engine! The cowling and the radiator for my conversion came from a Frog He 219 engine nacelle (Revell re-boxing, too) which is utterly dubious. The nacelle parts were turned upside down and integrated into the slender Fw 190 front fuselage with several layers of putty.
Inside of the cowling, a radiator plate from an Italeri Fw 190D was mounted, together with a styrene tube adapter for the new propeller. The latter was scratched, using a drop tank as spinner and single propeller blades from the Mistercraft Fw 190D, plus one donor blade from the Frog Ta 152H kit, which had to be trimmed in order to match the other blades. But with some paint, no one will tell the small differences…
Once the bigger engine was integrated into the fuselage, the exhaust system had to be added. In real life, the Jumo 222 would have featured three clusters with two rows of four exhaust stubs, distributed evenly around the cowling. Using a drawing of this arrangement as benchmark, I started with square cuts for the cluster openings. From the back side, styrene sheet closed the gaps and offered a basis for the exhaust stubs. These were improvised with H0 scale roofing shingles – each of the 24 exhaust stubs was cut individually into shape and size and then glued into the respective openings on the upper flanks and under the engine. Finally, styrene sheet was used to create small spoilers and heat shields. The result is certainly not perfect, but comes close to what the real world arrangement would basically have looked like. In a final step, two air intakes for the two-stage supercharger, scratched from sprue material, were added to the flanks.
The cockpit remained OOB, simple as it is, as well as the landing gear, but the canopy was modified in order to allow a presentation in open position. This meant that the OOB canopy had to be cut in two parts and that the model’s spine had to be cut away, making place for a donor canopy (the late, bulged variant, IIRC from an Italeri Fw 190D-9). Internally the fuselage gap was filled with putty and the headrest had to be modified, too, but the conversion turned out to look better than expected.
As a small cosmetic improvement, the molded gun barrel stumps in the wing roots were replaced with hollow steel needles, and the outer guns were completely removed.
The kit and its assembly:
I am not a big F-16 fan, but in some cases it’s an unavoidable canvas – just like in this case here. This fictional aircraft model (or better: this model of a [yet] fictional F-16 operator) was spawned by two ideas. One was the simple question: what if the Ukraine had after the USSR’s dissolution chosen a stronger attachment to (old) Western forces after the dissolution of the USSSR? And/or: what if the Ukraine had started to procure non-Russian equipment, esp. aircraft? So, what would an Ukrainian F-16 might have looked like, in general but esp. after the Crimea annexation in 2014 when such a scenario had become even more possible?
The other source of inspiration was a picture of an Ukrainian Su-24 with grey digital camouflage, a scheme that was/is also worn by some Su-25s. When I stumbled upon an Authentic Decals sheet for this unique paint scheme that allows to apply the complex and delicate pattern through water-slide transfers, I thought that the relatively “flat” F-16 surface would be an ideal basis to try this stunt?
What sounded like a very simple livery whif on an OOB model turned into a construction nightmare. Originally, this project provided me with a purpose for a dubious Trumpeter F-16 kit that I had bought some years ago – dead cheap, but righteously so. This kit is cruel, the model even has no concrete variant specification and is apparently the re-boxing of a kit from an obscure Chinese company called “Income”. Effectively, the Trumpeter F-16 is a rip-off of Italeri’s quite nice F-16C/D kit – but the Income/Trumpeter clone comes with MUCH deeper engravings esp. on the fuselage that remind a lot of the dreaded Matchbox “trenches”. Everything is rather “soft” and toylike, the clear parts are poor and the (few) decals look like toy stickers (!!!). I’d call it crude, even the instructions are apparently poor scans or photocopies from the Italeri kit, including hints for detail painting with no corresponding reference what colors should be used at all… All that could have been overlooked, but after starting with the kit I could not commit myself to use it any further. It’s rare that I give up because of a kit’s basis!
Next idea to “save” the project’s idea of an Ukrainian F-16 was to dig out a surplus Intech F-16 from the pile, also bought long ago because it was cheap, as conversion fodder. This kit has also been re-released in infinite variations under the Mister-/Mastercraft label. Upon closer inspection this kit turned out to have massive flaws, too, but in different areas from the Trumpeter thing. For instance, the Intech kit’s wings are utterly thick, certainly 1mm thicker than the Trumpeter model’s parts. This does not sound much, but on the really thin F-16 wings and stabilizers this looks really awful! Furthermore, the clear parts had not been fully molded, so I’d have needed a replacement canopy, anyway. Again, I gave up on building…
…until I decided to make the best of this mess and combine the “best” parts from both gimp models, trying to mend the worst flaws to an acceptable level. This led to the glorious kitbashing that this model eventually became! From the Intech kit I took the acceptable fuselage, including cockpit interior, air intake and landing gear, as well as the fin and the weapon pylons. The Trumpeter kit donated its thinner wings and the stabilizers, as well as the much better open exhaust nozzle (there’s an optional closed one, too; the Intech kit only offers an open nozzle, without ANY surface detail at all, it’s just a blank pipe!).
Beyond these basic ingredients, some more donors became necessary: All clear parts from both Intech and Trumpeter kit turned out to be rubbish for various reasons. The decision to build an F-16D two-seater was dictated by the fact that I had a leftover canopy from an Italeri F-16 kit in the donor bank – luckily it fitted well to the Intech kit’s body. Two crewmen from the spares box populate the cockpit and hide the rather basic interior, which was not improved at all. Furthermore, the ordnance came from external sources, too. The characteristic drop tanks with their cut-off tails were also leftover parts from the Italeri F-16, all AAMs come from a Hasegawa weapon set.
Some PSR was necessary to blend the parts from different kits together – thankfully, almost all F-16 kits are constructed in a similar fashion, even though there are small detail differences. In this case, the wings had to be slightly modified to fit onto the Intech fuselage. However, even those parts from the original kit(s) that are supposed to fit, e.g. the fin or the alternative cockpit opening frames for the optional single- and two-seater canopies, do hardly match at all. Horrible.
I rather focused on the model’s exterior, and a personal addition to improve the overall look of the otherwise rather basic/poor model, I added some small blade antennae that were totally missing on either model. Another extra detail are the small static dischargers on the trailing edges, created with thin, heated sprue material. Only small details, but they improve IMHO the model’s look considerably.
The kit and its assembly:
I am not a big F-16 fan, but in some cases it’s an unavoidable canvas – just like in this case here. This fictional aircraft model (or better: this model of a [yet] fictional F-16 operator) was spawned by two ideas. One was the simple question: what if the Ukraine had after the USSR’s dissolution chosen a stronger attachment to (old) Western forces after the dissolution of the USSSR? And/or: what if the Ukraine had started to procure non-Russian equipment, esp. aircraft? So, what would an Ukrainian F-16 might have looked like, in general but esp. after the Crimea annexation in 2014 when such a scenario had become even more possible?
The other source of inspiration was a picture of an Ukrainian Su-24 with grey digital camouflage, a scheme that was/is also worn by some Su-25s. When I stumbled upon an Authentic Decals sheet for this unique paint scheme that allows to apply the complex and delicate pattern through water-slide transfers, I thought that the relatively “flat” F-16 surface would be an ideal basis to try this stunt?
What sounded like a very simple livery whif on an OOB model turned into a construction nightmare. Originally, this project provided me with a purpose for a dubious Trumpeter F-16 kit that I had bought some years ago – dead cheap, but righteously so. This kit is cruel, the model even has no concrete variant specification and is apparently the re-boxing of a kit from an obscure Chinese company called “Income”. Effectively, the Trumpeter F-16 is a rip-off of Italeri’s quite nice F-16C/D kit – but the Income/Trumpeter clone comes with MUCH deeper engravings esp. on the fuselage that remind a lot of the dreaded Matchbox “trenches”. Everything is rather “soft” and toylike, the clear parts are poor and the (few) decals look like toy stickers (!!!). I’d call it crude, even the instructions are apparently poor scans or photocopies from the Italeri kit, including hints for detail painting with no corresponding reference what colors should be used at all… All that could have been overlooked, but after starting with the kit I could not commit myself to use it any further. It’s rare that I give up because of a kit’s basis!
Next idea to “save” the project’s idea of an Ukrainian F-16 was to dig out a surplus Intech F-16 from the pile, also bought long ago because it was cheap, as conversion fodder. This kit has also been re-released in infinite variations under the Mister-/Mastercraft label. Upon closer inspection this kit turned out to have massive flaws, too, but in different areas from the Trumpeter thing. For instance, the Intech kit’s wings are utterly thick, certainly 1mm thicker than the Trumpeter model’s parts. This does not sound much, but on the really thin F-16 wings and stabilizers this looks really awful! Furthermore, the clear parts had not been fully molded, so I’d have needed a replacement canopy, anyway. Again, I gave up on building…
…until I decided to make the best of this mess and combine the “best” parts from both gimp models, trying to mend the worst flaws to an acceptable level. This led to the glorious kitbashing that this model eventually became! From the Intech kit I took the acceptable fuselage, including cockpit interior, air intake and landing gear, as well as the fin and the weapon pylons. The Trumpeter kit donated its thinner wings and the stabilizers, as well as the much better open exhaust nozzle (there’s an optional closed one, too; the Intech kit only offers an open nozzle, without ANY surface detail at all, it’s just a blank pipe!).
Beyond these basic ingredients, some more donors became necessary: All clear parts from both Intech and Trumpeter kit turned out to be rubbish for various reasons. The decision to build an F-16D two-seater was dictated by the fact that I had a leftover canopy from an Italeri F-16 kit in the donor bank – luckily it fitted well to the Intech kit’s body. Two crewmen from the spares box populate the cockpit and hide the rather basic interior, which was not improved at all. Furthermore, the ordnance came from external sources, too. The characteristic drop tanks with their cut-off tails were also leftover parts from the Italeri F-16, all AAMs come from a Hasegawa weapon set.
Some PSR was necessary to blend the parts from different kits together – thankfully, almost all F-16 kits are constructed in a similar fashion, even though there are small detail differences. In this case, the wings had to be slightly modified to fit onto the Intech fuselage. However, even those parts from the original kit(s) that are supposed to fit, e.g. the fin or the alternative cockpit opening frames for the optional single- and two-seater canopies, do hardly match at all. Horrible.
I rather focused on the model’s exterior, and a personal addition to improve the overall look of the otherwise rather basic/poor model, I added some small blade antennae that were totally missing on either model. Another extra detail are the small static dischargers on the trailing edges, created with thin, heated sprue material. Only small details, but they improve IMHO the model’s look considerably.
The kit and its assembly:
This is a what-if model, but, as usual, it is rooted in reality – to be precise in the German late-war plans to mate the Ta 152(H) with the mighty Jumo 222 engine. I do not know what the official service designation would have been, but this combo would have resulted in a powerful fighter – AFAIK, German engineers’ calculations indicated a performance that would have been comparable with the post-WWII F4U-5!
Creating a model of such this paper aircraft called for some serious conversion work and ended almost in a kitbashing. The starting point became a (cheap) Mistercraft Fw 190D-9 kit, and I originally planned this model to be a Fw 190 variant, but eventually this turned into a Ta 152, since it would better match up with the late war time frame.
The Mastercraft/Mistercraft kit appears to be an indigenous mold and not a re-issue of a vintage kit. At first glance the parts look pretty crisp, but the kit has some serious fit and flash issues. Another selling point is the detailed decal set, which comes in three sheets and encompasses a lot of stencils – even though the instructions where to place them are not consistent, and there are even 1:48 scale(!) markings included. But that’s a Mastercraft/Mistercraft standard, anyway…
Well, the basis was sound and the kit would, in any event, be thoroughly modified. From the OOB kit, fuselage, wings and stabilizers were taken, as well as the landing gear and some other bits.
The wings were extended, in order to keep overall proportions with the new, much more massive engine cowling balanced (see below). Not an easy stunt, but I was lucky to have recently bought a set of resin Doppelreiter tanks from Airmodel which were just perfect to cover the cuts and seams on the upper wing surfaces. Inside of the wings, a styrene strip secured stability while the lower wing surface was sculpted with putty and the trailing edge of the outer wing panels was cut down by 1 mm, so that the wings’ outlines match again. Some further PSR work was necessary to blend the slipper tanks into the wings, forming the upper side of the modifications, but in the end the whole thing looks quite good.
The fuselage lost both its original engine and the tail. The latter is a donor part from a Frog Ta 152H (Revell re-boxing), but mating it with the Mistercraft Fw 190D was not easy because the fuselage shapes of the two kits are totally different! I also used the Mistercraft stabilizers because they were markedly bigger than the same parts from the Ta 152 kit!
The Jumo 222 front end was simulated with parts from the spares box, and it is a bit exaggerated. Actually, the Jumo 222 was hardly bigger (in both length and diameter) than the Fw 190D’s Jumo 213 V12 engine! The cowling and the radiator for my conversion came from a Frog He 219 engine nacelle (Revell re-boxing, too) which is utterly dubious. The nacelle parts were turned upside down and integrated into the slender Fw 190 front fuselage with several layers of putty.
Inside of the cowling, a radiator plate from an Italeri Fw 190D was mounted, together with a styrene tube adapter for the new propeller. The latter was scratched, using a drop tank as spinner and single propeller blades from the Mistercraft Fw 190D, plus one donor blade from the Frog Ta 152H kit, which had to be trimmed in order to match the other blades. But with some paint, no one will tell the small differences…
Once the bigger engine was integrated into the fuselage, the exhaust system had to be added. In real life, the Jumo 222 would have featured three clusters with two rows of four exhaust stubs, distributed evenly around the cowling. Using a drawing of this arrangement as benchmark, I started with square cuts for the cluster openings. From the back side, styrene sheet closed the gaps and offered a basis for the exhaust stubs. These were improvised with H0 scale roofing shingles – each of the 24 exhaust stubs was cut individually into shape and size and then glued into the respective openings on the upper flanks and under the engine. Finally, styrene sheet was used to create small spoilers and heat shields. The result is certainly not perfect, but comes close to what the real world arrangement would basically have looked like. In a final step, two air intakes for the two-stage supercharger, scratched from sprue material, were added to the flanks.
The cockpit remained OOB, simple as it is, as well as the landing gear, but the canopy was modified in order to allow a presentation in open position. This meant that the OOB canopy had to be cut in two parts and that the model’s spine had to be cut away, making place for a donor canopy (the late, bulged variant, IIRC from an Italeri Fw 190D-9). Internally the fuselage gap was filled with putty and the headrest had to be modified, too, but the conversion turned out to look better than expected.
As a small cosmetic improvement, the molded gun barrel stumps in the wing roots were replaced with hollow steel needles, and the outer guns were completely removed.
The kit and its assembly:
I am not a big F-16 fan, but in some cases it’s an unavoidable canvas – just like in this case here. This fictional aircraft model (or better: this model of a [yet] fictional F-16 operator) was spawned by two ideas. One was the simple question: what if the Ukraine had after the USSR’s dissolution chosen a stronger attachment to (old) Western forces after the dissolution of the USSSR? And/or: what if the Ukraine had started to procure non-Russian equipment, esp. aircraft? So, what would an Ukrainian F-16 might have looked like, in general but esp. after the Crimea annexation in 2014 when such a scenario had become even more possible?
The other source of inspiration was a picture of an Ukrainian Su-24 with grey digital camouflage, a scheme that was/is also worn by some Su-25s. When I stumbled upon an Authentic Decals sheet for this unique paint scheme that allows to apply the complex and delicate pattern through water-slide transfers, I thought that the relatively “flat” F-16 surface would be an ideal basis to try this stunt?
What sounded like a very simple livery whif on an OOB model turned into a construction nightmare. Originally, this project provided me with a purpose for a dubious Trumpeter F-16 kit that I had bought some years ago – dead cheap, but righteously so. This kit is cruel, the model even has no concrete variant specification and is apparently the re-boxing of a kit from an obscure Chinese company called “Income”. Effectively, the Trumpeter F-16 is a rip-off of Italeri’s quite nice F-16C/D kit – but the Income/Trumpeter clone comes with MUCH deeper engravings esp. on the fuselage that remind a lot of the dreaded Matchbox “trenches”. Everything is rather “soft” and toylike, the clear parts are poor and the (few) decals look like toy stickers (!!!). I’d call it crude, even the instructions are apparently poor scans or photocopies from the Italeri kit, including hints for detail painting with no corresponding reference what colors should be used at all… All that could have been overlooked, but after starting with the kit I could not commit myself to use it any further. It’s rare that I give up because of a kit’s basis!
Next idea to “save” the project’s idea of an Ukrainian F-16 was to dig out a surplus Intech F-16 from the pile, also bought long ago because it was cheap, as conversion fodder. This kit has also been re-released in infinite variations under the Mister-/Mastercraft label. Upon closer inspection this kit turned out to have massive flaws, too, but in different areas from the Trumpeter thing. For instance, the Intech kit’s wings are utterly thick, certainly 1mm thicker than the Trumpeter model’s parts. This does not sound much, but on the really thin F-16 wings and stabilizers this looks really awful! Furthermore, the clear parts had not been fully molded, so I’d have needed a replacement canopy, anyway. Again, I gave up on building…
…until I decided to make the best of this mess and combine the “best” parts from both gimp models, trying to mend the worst flaws to an acceptable level. This led to the glorious kitbashing that this model eventually became! From the Intech kit I took the acceptable fuselage, including cockpit interior, air intake and landing gear, as well as the fin and the weapon pylons. The Trumpeter kit donated its thinner wings and the stabilizers, as well as the much better open exhaust nozzle (there’s an optional closed one, too; the Intech kit only offers an open nozzle, without ANY surface detail at all, it’s just a blank pipe!).
Beyond these basic ingredients, some more donors became necessary: All clear parts from both Intech and Trumpeter kit turned out to be rubbish for various reasons. The decision to build an F-16D two-seater was dictated by the fact that I had a leftover canopy from an Italeri F-16 kit in the donor bank – luckily it fitted well to the Intech kit’s body. Two crewmen from the spares box populate the cockpit and hide the rather basic interior, which was not improved at all. Furthermore, the ordnance came from external sources, too. The characteristic drop tanks with their cut-off tails were also leftover parts from the Italeri F-16, all AAMs come from a Hasegawa weapon set.
Some PSR was necessary to blend the parts from different kits together – thankfully, almost all F-16 kits are constructed in a similar fashion, even though there are small detail differences. In this case, the wings had to be slightly modified to fit onto the Intech fuselage. However, even those parts from the original kit(s) that are supposed to fit, e.g. the fin or the alternative cockpit opening frames for the optional single- and two-seater canopies, do hardly match at all. Horrible.
I rather focused on the model’s exterior, and a personal addition to improve the overall look of the otherwise rather basic/poor model, I added some small blade antennae that were totally missing on either model. Another extra detail are the small static dischargers on the trailing edges, created with thin, heated sprue material. Only small details, but they improve IMHO the model’s look considerably.
Various SeaDek applications on MasterCraft boats.
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The kit and its assembly:
This is a what-if model, but, as usual, it is rooted in reality – to be precise in the German late-war plans to mate the Ta 152(H) with the mighty Jumo 222 engine. I do not know what the official service designation would have been, but this combo would have resulted in a powerful fighter – AFAIK, German engineers’ calculations indicated a performance that would have been comparable with the post-WWII F4U-5!
Creating a model of such this paper aircraft called for some serious conversion work and ended almost in a kitbashing. The starting point became a (cheap) Mistercraft Fw 190D-9 kit, and I originally planned this model to be a Fw 190 variant, but eventually this turned into a Ta 152, since it would better match up with the late war time frame.
The Mastercraft/Mistercraft kit appears to be an indigenous mold and not a re-issue of a vintage kit. At first glance the parts look pretty crisp, but the kit has some serious fit and flash issues. Another selling point is the detailed decal set, which comes in three sheets and encompasses a lot of stencils – even though the instructions where to place them are not consistent, and there are even 1:48 scale(!) markings included. But that’s a Mastercraft/Mistercraft standard, anyway…
Well, the basis was sound and the kit would, in any event, be thoroughly modified. From the OOB kit, fuselage, wings and stabilizers were taken, as well as the landing gear and some other bits.
The wings were extended, in order to keep overall proportions with the new, much more massive engine cowling balanced (see below). Not an easy stunt, but I was lucky to have recently bought a set of resin Doppelreiter tanks from Airmodel which were just perfect to cover the cuts and seams on the upper wing surfaces. Inside of the wings, a styrene strip secured stability while the lower wing surface was sculpted with putty and the trailing edge of the outer wing panels was cut down by 1 mm, so that the wings’ outlines match again. Some further PSR work was necessary to blend the slipper tanks into the wings, forming the upper side of the modifications, but in the end the whole thing looks quite good.
The fuselage lost both its original engine and the tail. The latter is a donor part from a Frog Ta 152H (Revell re-boxing), but mating it with the Mistercraft Fw 190D was not easy because the fuselage shapes of the two kits are totally different! I also used the Mistercraft stabilizers because they were markedly bigger than the same parts from the Ta 152 kit!
The Jumo 222 front end was simulated with parts from the spares box, and it is a bit exaggerated. Actually, the Jumo 222 was hardly bigger (in both length and diameter) than the Fw 190D’s Jumo 213 V12 engine! The cowling and the radiator for my conversion came from a Frog He 219 engine nacelle (Revell re-boxing, too) which is utterly dubious. The nacelle parts were turned upside down and integrated into the slender Fw 190 front fuselage with several layers of putty.
Inside of the cowling, a radiator plate from an Italeri Fw 190D was mounted, together with a styrene tube adapter for the new propeller. The latter was scratched, using a drop tank as spinner and single propeller blades from the Mistercraft Fw 190D, plus one donor blade from the Frog Ta 152H kit, which had to be trimmed in order to match the other blades. But with some paint, no one will tell the small differences…
Once the bigger engine was integrated into the fuselage, the exhaust system had to be added. In real life, the Jumo 222 would have featured three clusters with two rows of four exhaust stubs, distributed evenly around the cowling. Using a drawing of this arrangement as benchmark, I started with square cuts for the cluster openings. From the back side, styrene sheet closed the gaps and offered a basis for the exhaust stubs. These were improvised with H0 scale roofing shingles – each of the 24 exhaust stubs was cut individually into shape and size and then glued into the respective openings on the upper flanks and under the engine. Finally, styrene sheet was used to create small spoilers and heat shields. The result is certainly not perfect, but comes close to what the real world arrangement would basically have looked like. In a final step, two air intakes for the two-stage supercharger, scratched from sprue material, were added to the flanks.
The cockpit remained OOB, simple as it is, as well as the landing gear, but the canopy was modified in order to allow a presentation in open position. This meant that the OOB canopy had to be cut in two parts and that the model’s spine had to be cut away, making place for a donor canopy (the late, bulged variant, IIRC from an Italeri Fw 190D-9). Internally the fuselage gap was filled with putty and the headrest had to be modified, too, but the conversion turned out to look better than expected.
As a small cosmetic improvement, the molded gun barrel stumps in the wing roots were replaced with hollow steel needles, and the outer guns were completely removed.
The kit and its assembly:
This is a what-if model, but, as usual, it is rooted in reality – to be precise in the German late-war plans to mate the Ta 152(H) with the mighty Jumo 222 engine. I do not know what the official service designation would have been, but this combo would have resulted in a powerful fighter – AFAIK, German engineers’ calculations indicated a performance that would have been comparable with the post-WWII F4U-5!
Creating a model of such this paper aircraft called for some serious conversion work and ended almost in a kitbashing. The starting point became a (cheap) Mistercraft Fw 190D-9 kit, and I originally planned this model to be a Fw 190 variant, but eventually this turned into a Ta 152, since it would better match up with the late war time frame.
The Mastercraft/Mistercraft kit appears to be an indigenous mold and not a re-issue of a vintage kit. At first glance the parts look pretty crisp, but the kit has some serious fit and flash issues. Another selling point is the detailed decal set, which comes in three sheets and encompasses a lot of stencils – even though the instructions where to place them are not consistent, and there are even 1:48 scale(!) markings included. But that’s a Mastercraft/Mistercraft standard, anyway…
Well, the basis was sound and the kit would, in any event, be thoroughly modified. From the OOB kit, fuselage, wings and stabilizers were taken, as well as the landing gear and some other bits.
The wings were extended, in order to keep overall proportions with the new, much more massive engine cowling balanced (see below). Not an easy stunt, but I was lucky to have recently bought a set of resin Doppelreiter tanks from Airmodel which were just perfect to cover the cuts and seams on the upper wing surfaces. Inside of the wings, a styrene strip secured stability while the lower wing surface was sculpted with putty and the trailing edge of the outer wing panels was cut down by 1 mm, so that the wings’ outlines match again. Some further PSR work was necessary to blend the slipper tanks into the wings, forming the upper side of the modifications, but in the end the whole thing looks quite good.
The fuselage lost both its original engine and the tail. The latter is a donor part from a Frog Ta 152H (Revell re-boxing), but mating it with the Mistercraft Fw 190D was not easy because the fuselage shapes of the two kits are totally different! I also used the Mistercraft stabilizers because they were markedly bigger than the same parts from the Ta 152 kit!
The Jumo 222 front end was simulated with parts from the spares box, and it is a bit exaggerated. Actually, the Jumo 222 was hardly bigger (in both length and diameter) than the Fw 190D’s Jumo 213 V12 engine! The cowling and the radiator for my conversion came from a Frog He 219 engine nacelle (Revell re-boxing, too) which is utterly dubious. The nacelle parts were turned upside down and integrated into the slender Fw 190 front fuselage with several layers of putty.
Inside of the cowling, a radiator plate from an Italeri Fw 190D was mounted, together with a styrene tube adapter for the new propeller. The latter was scratched, using a drop tank as spinner and single propeller blades from the Mistercraft Fw 190D, plus one donor blade from the Frog Ta 152H kit, which had to be trimmed in order to match the other blades. But with some paint, no one will tell the small differences…
Once the bigger engine was integrated into the fuselage, the exhaust system had to be added. In real life, the Jumo 222 would have featured three clusters with two rows of four exhaust stubs, distributed evenly around the cowling. Using a drawing of this arrangement as benchmark, I started with square cuts for the cluster openings. From the back side, styrene sheet closed the gaps and offered a basis for the exhaust stubs. These were improvised with H0 scale roofing shingles – each of the 24 exhaust stubs was cut individually into shape and size and then glued into the respective openings on the upper flanks and under the engine. Finally, styrene sheet was used to create small spoilers and heat shields. The result is certainly not perfect, but comes close to what the real world arrangement would basically have looked like. In a final step, two air intakes for the two-stage supercharger, scratched from sprue material, were added to the flanks.
The cockpit remained OOB, simple as it is, as well as the landing gear, but the canopy was modified in order to allow a presentation in open position. This meant that the OOB canopy had to be cut in two parts and that the model’s spine had to be cut away, making place for a donor canopy (the late, bulged variant, IIRC from an Italeri Fw 190D-9). Internally the fuselage gap was filled with putty and the headrest had to be modified, too, but the conversion turned out to look better than expected.
As a small cosmetic improvement, the molded gun barrel stumps in the wing roots were replaced with hollow steel needles, and the outer guns were completely removed.
The kit and its assembly:
This is a what-if model, but, as usual, it is rooted in reality – to be precise in the German late-war plans to mate the Ta 152(H) with the mighty Jumo 222 engine. I do not know what the official service designation would have been, but this combo would have resulted in a powerful fighter – AFAIK, German engineers’ calculations indicated a performance that would have been comparable with the post-WWII F4U-5!
Creating a model of such this paper aircraft called for some serious conversion work and ended almost in a kitbashing. The starting point became a (cheap) Mistercraft Fw 190D-9 kit, and I originally planned this model to be a Fw 190 variant, but eventually this turned into a Ta 152, since it would better match up with the late war time frame.
The Mastercraft/Mistercraft kit appears to be an indigenous mold and not a re-issue of a vintage kit. At first glance the parts look pretty crisp, but the kit has some serious fit and flash issues. Another selling point is the detailed decal set, which comes in three sheets and encompasses a lot of stencils – even though the instructions where to place them are not consistent, and there are even 1:48 scale(!) markings included. But that’s a Mastercraft/Mistercraft standard, anyway…
Well, the basis was sound and the kit would, in any event, be thoroughly modified. From the OOB kit, fuselage, wings and stabilizers were taken, as well as the landing gear and some other bits.
The wings were extended, in order to keep overall proportions with the new, much more massive engine cowling balanced (see below). Not an easy stunt, but I was lucky to have recently bought a set of resin Doppelreiter tanks from Airmodel which were just perfect to cover the cuts and seams on the upper wing surfaces. Inside of the wings, a styrene strip secured stability while the lower wing surface was sculpted with putty and the trailing edge of the outer wing panels was cut down by 1 mm, so that the wings’ outlines match again. Some further PSR work was necessary to blend the slipper tanks into the wings, forming the upper side of the modifications, but in the end the whole thing looks quite good.
The fuselage lost both its original engine and the tail. The latter is a donor part from a Frog Ta 152H (Revell re-boxing), but mating it with the Mistercraft Fw 190D was not easy because the fuselage shapes of the two kits are totally different! I also used the Mistercraft stabilizers because they were markedly bigger than the same parts from the Ta 152 kit!
The Jumo 222 front end was simulated with parts from the spares box, and it is a bit exaggerated. Actually, the Jumo 222 was hardly bigger (in both length and diameter) than the Fw 190D’s Jumo 213 V12 engine! The cowling and the radiator for my conversion came from a Frog He 219 engine nacelle (Revell re-boxing, too) which is utterly dubious. The nacelle parts were turned upside down and integrated into the slender Fw 190 front fuselage with several layers of putty.
Inside of the cowling, a radiator plate from an Italeri Fw 190D was mounted, together with a styrene tube adapter for the new propeller. The latter was scratched, using a drop tank as spinner and single propeller blades from the Mistercraft Fw 190D, plus one donor blade from the Frog Ta 152H kit, which had to be trimmed in order to match the other blades. But with some paint, no one will tell the small differences…
Once the bigger engine was integrated into the fuselage, the exhaust system had to be added. In real life, the Jumo 222 would have featured three clusters with two rows of four exhaust stubs, distributed evenly around the cowling. Using a drawing of this arrangement as benchmark, I started with square cuts for the cluster openings. From the back side, styrene sheet closed the gaps and offered a basis for the exhaust stubs. These were improvised with H0 scale roofing shingles – each of the 24 exhaust stubs was cut individually into shape and size and then glued into the respective openings on the upper flanks and under the engine. Finally, styrene sheet was used to create small spoilers and heat shields. The result is certainly not perfect, but comes close to what the real world arrangement would basically have looked like. In a final step, two air intakes for the two-stage supercharger, scratched from sprue material, were added to the flanks.
The cockpit remained OOB, simple as it is, as well as the landing gear, but the canopy was modified in order to allow a presentation in open position. This meant that the OOB canopy had to be cut in two parts and that the model’s spine had to be cut away, making place for a donor canopy (the late, bulged variant, IIRC from an Italeri Fw 190D-9). Internally the fuselage gap was filled with putty and the headrest had to be modified, too, but the conversion turned out to look better than expected.
As a small cosmetic improvement, the molded gun barrel stumps in the wing roots were replaced with hollow steel needles, and the outer guns were completely removed.
I use this baby for scarification, waxing and screening. Note the hole cut in it for dustless application.
The kit and its assembly:
This is a what-if model, but, as usual, it is rooted in reality – to be precise in the German late-war plans to mate the Ta 152(H) with the mighty Jumo 222 engine. I do not know what the official service designation would have been, but this combo would have resulted in a powerful fighter – AFAIK, German engineers’ calculations indicated a performance that would have been comparable with the post-WWII F4U-5!
Creating a model of such this paper aircraft called for some serious conversion work and ended almost in a kitbashing. The starting point became a (cheap) Mistercraft Fw 190D-9 kit, and I originally planned this model to be a Fw 190 variant, but eventually this turned into a Ta 152, since it would better match up with the late war time frame.
The Mastercraft/Mistercraft kit appears to be an indigenous mold and not a re-issue of a vintage kit. At first glance the parts look pretty crisp, but the kit has some serious fit and flash issues. Another selling point is the detailed decal set, which comes in three sheets and encompasses a lot of stencils – even though the instructions where to place them are not consistent, and there are even 1:48 scale(!) markings included. But that’s a Mastercraft/Mistercraft standard, anyway…
Well, the basis was sound and the kit would, in any event, be thoroughly modified. From the OOB kit, fuselage, wings and stabilizers were taken, as well as the landing gear and some other bits.
The wings were extended, in order to keep overall proportions with the new, much more massive engine cowling balanced (see below). Not an easy stunt, but I was lucky to have recently bought a set of resin Doppelreiter tanks from Airmodel which were just perfect to cover the cuts and seams on the upper wing surfaces. Inside of the wings, a styrene strip secured stability while the lower wing surface was sculpted with putty and the trailing edge of the outer wing panels was cut down by 1 mm, so that the wings’ outlines match again. Some further PSR work was necessary to blend the slipper tanks into the wings, forming the upper side of the modifications, but in the end the whole thing looks quite good.
The fuselage lost both its original engine and the tail. The latter is a donor part from a Frog Ta 152H (Revell re-boxing), but mating it with the Mistercraft Fw 190D was not easy because the fuselage shapes of the two kits are totally different! I also used the Mistercraft stabilizers because they were markedly bigger than the same parts from the Ta 152 kit!
The Jumo 222 front end was simulated with parts from the spares box, and it is a bit exaggerated. Actually, the Jumo 222 was hardly bigger (in both length and diameter) than the Fw 190D’s Jumo 213 V12 engine! The cowling and the radiator for my conversion came from a Frog He 219 engine nacelle (Revell re-boxing, too) which is utterly dubious. The nacelle parts were turned upside down and integrated into the slender Fw 190 front fuselage with several layers of putty.
Inside of the cowling, a radiator plate from an Italeri Fw 190D was mounted, together with a styrene tube adapter for the new propeller. The latter was scratched, using a drop tank as spinner and single propeller blades from the Mistercraft Fw 190D, plus one donor blade from the Frog Ta 152H kit, which had to be trimmed in order to match the other blades. But with some paint, no one will tell the small differences…
Once the bigger engine was integrated into the fuselage, the exhaust system had to be added. In real life, the Jumo 222 would have featured three clusters with two rows of four exhaust stubs, distributed evenly around the cowling. Using a drawing of this arrangement as benchmark, I started with square cuts for the cluster openings. From the back side, styrene sheet closed the gaps and offered a basis for the exhaust stubs. These were improvised with H0 scale roofing shingles – each of the 24 exhaust stubs was cut individually into shape and size and then glued into the respective openings on the upper flanks and under the engine. Finally, styrene sheet was used to create small spoilers and heat shields. The result is certainly not perfect, but comes close to what the real world arrangement would basically have looked like. In a final step, two air intakes for the two-stage supercharger, scratched from sprue material, were added to the flanks.
The cockpit remained OOB, simple as it is, as well as the landing gear, but the canopy was modified in order to allow a presentation in open position. This meant that the OOB canopy had to be cut in two parts and that the model’s spine had to be cut away, making place for a donor canopy (the late, bulged variant, IIRC from an Italeri Fw 190D-9). Internally the fuselage gap was filled with putty and the headrest had to be modified, too, but the conversion turned out to look better than expected.
As a small cosmetic improvement, the molded gun barrel stumps in the wing roots were replaced with hollow steel needles, and the outer guns were completely removed.
The kit and its assembly:
This is a what-if model, but, as usual, it is rooted in reality – to be precise in the German late-war plans to mate the Ta 152(H) with the mighty Jumo 222 engine. I do not know what the official service designation would have been, but this combo would have resulted in a powerful fighter – AFAIK, German engineers’ calculations indicated a performance that would have been comparable with the post-WWII F4U-5!
Creating a model of such this paper aircraft called for some serious conversion work and ended almost in a kitbashing. The starting point became a (cheap) Mistercraft Fw 190D-9 kit, and I originally planned this model to be a Fw 190 variant, but eventually this turned into a Ta 152, since it would better match up with the late war time frame.
The Mastercraft/Mistercraft kit appears to be an indigenous mold and not a re-issue of a vintage kit. At first glance the parts look pretty crisp, but the kit has some serious fit and flash issues. Another selling point is the detailed decal set, which comes in three sheets and encompasses a lot of stencils – even though the instructions where to place them are not consistent, and there are even 1:48 scale(!) markings included. But that’s a Mastercraft/Mistercraft standard, anyway…
Well, the basis was sound and the kit would, in any event, be thoroughly modified. From the OOB kit, fuselage, wings and stabilizers were taken, as well as the landing gear and some other bits.
The wings were extended, in order to keep overall proportions with the new, much more massive engine cowling balanced (see below). Not an easy stunt, but I was lucky to have recently bought a set of resin Doppelreiter tanks from Airmodel which were just perfect to cover the cuts and seams on the upper wing surfaces. Inside of the wings, a styrene strip secured stability while the lower wing surface was sculpted with putty and the trailing edge of the outer wing panels was cut down by 1 mm, so that the wings’ outlines match again. Some further PSR work was necessary to blend the slipper tanks into the wings, forming the upper side of the modifications, but in the end the whole thing looks quite good.
The fuselage lost both its original engine and the tail. The latter is a donor part from a Frog Ta 152H (Revell re-boxing), but mating it with the Mistercraft Fw 190D was not easy because the fuselage shapes of the two kits are totally different! I also used the Mistercraft stabilizers because they were markedly bigger than the same parts from the Ta 152 kit!
The Jumo 222 front end was simulated with parts from the spares box, and it is a bit exaggerated. Actually, the Jumo 222 was hardly bigger (in both length and diameter) than the Fw 190D’s Jumo 213 V12 engine! The cowling and the radiator for my conversion came from a Frog He 219 engine nacelle (Revell re-boxing, too) which is utterly dubious. The nacelle parts were turned upside down and integrated into the slender Fw 190 front fuselage with several layers of putty.
Inside of the cowling, a radiator plate from an Italeri Fw 190D was mounted, together with a styrene tube adapter for the new propeller. The latter was scratched, using a drop tank as spinner and single propeller blades from the Mistercraft Fw 190D, plus one donor blade from the Frog Ta 152H kit, which had to be trimmed in order to match the other blades. But with some paint, no one will tell the small differences…
Once the bigger engine was integrated into the fuselage, the exhaust system had to be added. In real life, the Jumo 222 would have featured three clusters with two rows of four exhaust stubs, distributed evenly around the cowling. Using a drawing of this arrangement as benchmark, I started with square cuts for the cluster openings. From the back side, styrene sheet closed the gaps and offered a basis for the exhaust stubs. These were improvised with H0 scale roofing shingles – each of the 24 exhaust stubs was cut individually into shape and size and then glued into the respective openings on the upper flanks and under the engine. Finally, styrene sheet was used to create small spoilers and heat shields. The result is certainly not perfect, but comes close to what the real world arrangement would basically have looked like. In a final step, two air intakes for the two-stage supercharger, scratched from sprue material, were added to the flanks.
The cockpit remained OOB, simple as it is, as well as the landing gear, but the canopy was modified in order to allow a presentation in open position. This meant that the OOB canopy had to be cut in two parts and that the model’s spine had to be cut away, making place for a donor canopy (the late, bulged variant, IIRC from an Italeri Fw 190D-9). Internally the fuselage gap was filled with putty and the headrest had to be modified, too, but the conversion turned out to look better than expected.
As a small cosmetic improvement, the molded gun barrel stumps in the wing roots were replaced with hollow steel needles, and the outer guns were completely removed.
The kit and its assembly:
This is a what-if model, but, as usual, it is rooted in reality – to be precise in the German late-war plans to mate the Ta 152(H) with the mighty Jumo 222 engine. I do not know what the official service designation would have been, but this combo would have resulted in a powerful fighter – AFAIK, German engineers’ calculations indicated a performance that would have been comparable with the post-WWII F4U-5!
Creating a model of such this paper aircraft called for some serious conversion work and ended almost in a kitbashing. The starting point became a (cheap) Mistercraft Fw 190D-9 kit, and I originally planned this model to be a Fw 190 variant, but eventually this turned into a Ta 152, since it would better match up with the late war time frame.
The Mastercraft/Mistercraft kit appears to be an indigenous mold and not a re-issue of a vintage kit. At first glance the parts look pretty crisp, but the kit has some serious fit and flash issues. Another selling point is the detailed decal set, which comes in three sheets and encompasses a lot of stencils – even though the instructions where to place them are not consistent, and there are even 1:48 scale(!) markings included. But that’s a Mastercraft/Mistercraft standard, anyway…
Well, the basis was sound and the kit would, in any event, be thoroughly modified. From the OOB kit, fuselage, wings and stabilizers were taken, as well as the landing gear and some other bits.
The wings were extended, in order to keep overall proportions with the new, much more massive engine cowling balanced (see below). Not an easy stunt, but I was lucky to have recently bought a set of resin Doppelreiter tanks from Airmodel which were just perfect to cover the cuts and seams on the upper wing surfaces. Inside of the wings, a styrene strip secured stability while the lower wing surface was sculpted with putty and the trailing edge of the outer wing panels was cut down by 1 mm, so that the wings’ outlines match again. Some further PSR work was necessary to blend the slipper tanks into the wings, forming the upper side of the modifications, but in the end the whole thing looks quite good.
The fuselage lost both its original engine and the tail. The latter is a donor part from a Frog Ta 152H (Revell re-boxing), but mating it with the Mistercraft Fw 190D was not easy because the fuselage shapes of the two kits are totally different! I also used the Mistercraft stabilizers because they were markedly bigger than the same parts from the Ta 152 kit!
The Jumo 222 front end was simulated with parts from the spares box, and it is a bit exaggerated. Actually, the Jumo 222 was hardly bigger (in both length and diameter) than the Fw 190D’s Jumo 213 V12 engine! The cowling and the radiator for my conversion came from a Frog He 219 engine nacelle (Revell re-boxing, too) which is utterly dubious. The nacelle parts were turned upside down and integrated into the slender Fw 190 front fuselage with several layers of putty.
Inside of the cowling, a radiator plate from an Italeri Fw 190D was mounted, together with a styrene tube adapter for the new propeller. The latter was scratched, using a drop tank as spinner and single propeller blades from the Mistercraft Fw 190D, plus one donor blade from the Frog Ta 152H kit, which had to be trimmed in order to match the other blades. But with some paint, no one will tell the small differences…
Once the bigger engine was integrated into the fuselage, the exhaust system had to be added. In real life, the Jumo 222 would have featured three clusters with two rows of four exhaust stubs, distributed evenly around the cowling. Using a drawing of this arrangement as benchmark, I started with square cuts for the cluster openings. From the back side, styrene sheet closed the gaps and offered a basis for the exhaust stubs. These were improvised with H0 scale roofing shingles – each of the 24 exhaust stubs was cut individually into shape and size and then glued into the respective openings on the upper flanks and under the engine. Finally, styrene sheet was used to create small spoilers and heat shields. The result is certainly not perfect, but comes close to what the real world arrangement would basically have looked like. In a final step, two air intakes for the two-stage supercharger, scratched from sprue material, were added to the flanks.
The cockpit remained OOB, simple as it is, as well as the landing gear, but the canopy was modified in order to allow a presentation in open position. This meant that the OOB canopy had to be cut in two parts and that the model’s spine had to be cut away, making place for a donor canopy (the late, bulged variant, IIRC from an Italeri Fw 190D-9). Internally the fuselage gap was filled with putty and the headrest had to be modified, too, but the conversion turned out to look better than expected.
As a small cosmetic improvement, the molded gun barrel stumps in the wing roots were replaced with hollow steel needles, and the outer guns were completely removed.
The kit and its assembly:
This is a what-if model, but, as usual, it is rooted in reality – to be precise in the German late-war plans to mate the Ta 152(H) with the mighty Jumo 222 engine. I do not know what the official service designation would have been, but this combo would have resulted in a powerful fighter – AFAIK, German engineers’ calculations indicated a performance that would have been comparable with the post-WWII F4U-5!
Creating a model of such this paper aircraft called for some serious conversion work and ended almost in a kitbashing. The starting point became a (cheap) Mistercraft Fw 190D-9 kit, and I originally planned this model to be a Fw 190 variant, but eventually this turned into a Ta 152, since it would better match up with the late war time frame.
The Mastercraft/Mistercraft kit appears to be an indigenous mold and not a re-issue of a vintage kit. At first glance the parts look pretty crisp, but the kit has some serious fit and flash issues. Another selling point is the detailed decal set, which comes in three sheets and encompasses a lot of stencils – even though the instructions where to place them are not consistent, and there are even 1:48 scale(!) markings included. But that’s a Mastercraft/Mistercraft standard, anyway…
Well, the basis was sound and the kit would, in any event, be thoroughly modified. From the OOB kit, fuselage, wings and stabilizers were taken, as well as the landing gear and some other bits.
The wings were extended, in order to keep overall proportions with the new, much more massive engine cowling balanced (see below). Not an easy stunt, but I was lucky to have recently bought a set of resin Doppelreiter tanks from Airmodel which were just perfect to cover the cuts and seams on the upper wing surfaces. Inside of the wings, a styrene strip secured stability while the lower wing surface was sculpted with putty and the trailing edge of the outer wing panels was cut down by 1 mm, so that the wings’ outlines match again. Some further PSR work was necessary to blend the slipper tanks into the wings, forming the upper side of the modifications, but in the end the whole thing looks quite good.
The fuselage lost both its original engine and the tail. The latter is a donor part from a Frog Ta 152H (Revell re-boxing), but mating it with the Mistercraft Fw 190D was not easy because the fuselage shapes of the two kits are totally different! I also used the Mistercraft stabilizers because they were markedly bigger than the same parts from the Ta 152 kit!
The Jumo 222 front end was simulated with parts from the spares box, and it is a bit exaggerated. Actually, the Jumo 222 was hardly bigger (in both length and diameter) than the Fw 190D’s Jumo 213 V12 engine! The cowling and the radiator for my conversion came from a Frog He 219 engine nacelle (Revell re-boxing, too) which is utterly dubious. The nacelle parts were turned upside down and integrated into the slender Fw 190 front fuselage with several layers of putty.
Inside of the cowling, a radiator plate from an Italeri Fw 190D was mounted, together with a styrene tube adapter for the new propeller. The latter was scratched, using a drop tank as spinner and single propeller blades from the Mistercraft Fw 190D, plus one donor blade from the Frog Ta 152H kit, which had to be trimmed in order to match the other blades. But with some paint, no one will tell the small differences…
Once the bigger engine was integrated into the fuselage, the exhaust system had to be added. In real life, the Jumo 222 would have featured three clusters with two rows of four exhaust stubs, distributed evenly around the cowling. Using a drawing of this arrangement as benchmark, I started with square cuts for the cluster openings. From the back side, styrene sheet closed the gaps and offered a basis for the exhaust stubs. These were improvised with H0 scale roofing shingles – each of the 24 exhaust stubs was cut individually into shape and size and then glued into the respective openings on the upper flanks and under the engine. Finally, styrene sheet was used to create small spoilers and heat shields. The result is certainly not perfect, but comes close to what the real world arrangement would basically have looked like. In a final step, two air intakes for the two-stage supercharger, scratched from sprue material, were added to the flanks.
The cockpit remained OOB, simple as it is, as well as the landing gear, but the canopy was modified in order to allow a presentation in open position. This meant that the OOB canopy had to be cut in two parts and that the model’s spine had to be cut away, making place for a donor canopy (the late, bulged variant, IIRC from an Italeri Fw 190D-9). Internally the fuselage gap was filled with putty and the headrest had to be modified, too, but the conversion turned out to look better than expected.
As a small cosmetic improvement, the molded gun barrel stumps in the wing roots were replaced with hollow steel needles, and the outer guns were completely removed.
The kit and its assembly:
This is a what-if model, but, as usual, it is rooted in reality – to be precise in the German late-war plans to mate the Ta 152(H) with the mighty Jumo 222 engine. I do not know what the official service designation would have been, but this combo would have resulted in a powerful fighter – AFAIK, German engineers’ calculations indicated a performance that would have been comparable with the post-WWII F4U-5!
Creating a model of such this paper aircraft called for some serious conversion work and ended almost in a kitbashing. The starting point became a (cheap) Mistercraft Fw 190D-9 kit, and I originally planned this model to be a Fw 190 variant, but eventually this turned into a Ta 152, since it would better match up with the late war time frame.
The Mastercraft/Mistercraft kit appears to be an indigenous mold and not a re-issue of a vintage kit. At first glance the parts look pretty crisp, but the kit has some serious fit and flash issues. Another selling point is the detailed decal set, which comes in three sheets and encompasses a lot of stencils – even though the instructions where to place them are not consistent, and there are even 1:48 scale(!) markings included. But that’s a Mastercraft/Mistercraft standard, anyway…
Well, the basis was sound and the kit would, in any event, be thoroughly modified. From the OOB kit, fuselage, wings and stabilizers were taken, as well as the landing gear and some other bits.
The wings were extended, in order to keep overall proportions with the new, much more massive engine cowling balanced (see below). Not an easy stunt, but I was lucky to have recently bought a set of resin Doppelreiter tanks from Airmodel which were just perfect to cover the cuts and seams on the upper wing surfaces. Inside of the wings, a styrene strip secured stability while the lower wing surface was sculpted with putty and the trailing edge of the outer wing panels was cut down by 1 mm, so that the wings’ outlines match again. Some further PSR work was necessary to blend the slipper tanks into the wings, forming the upper side of the modifications, but in the end the whole thing looks quite good.
The fuselage lost both its original engine and the tail. The latter is a donor part from a Frog Ta 152H (Revell re-boxing), but mating it with the Mistercraft Fw 190D was not easy because the fuselage shapes of the two kits are totally different! I also used the Mistercraft stabilizers because they were markedly bigger than the same parts from the Ta 152 kit!
The Jumo 222 front end was simulated with parts from the spares box, and it is a bit exaggerated. Actually, the Jumo 222 was hardly bigger (in both length and diameter) than the Fw 190D’s Jumo 213 V12 engine! The cowling and the radiator for my conversion came from a Frog He 219 engine nacelle (Revell re-boxing, too) which is utterly dubious. The nacelle parts were turned upside down and integrated into the slender Fw 190 front fuselage with several layers of putty.
Inside of the cowling, a radiator plate from an Italeri Fw 190D was mounted, together with a styrene tube adapter for the new propeller. The latter was scratched, using a drop tank as spinner and single propeller blades from the Mistercraft Fw 190D, plus one donor blade from the Frog Ta 152H kit, which had to be trimmed in order to match the other blades. But with some paint, no one will tell the small differences…
Once the bigger engine was integrated into the fuselage, the exhaust system had to be added. In real life, the Jumo 222 would have featured three clusters with two rows of four exhaust stubs, distributed evenly around the cowling. Using a drawing of this arrangement as benchmark, I started with square cuts for the cluster openings. From the back side, styrene sheet closed the gaps and offered a basis for the exhaust stubs. These were improvised with H0 scale roofing shingles – each of the 24 exhaust stubs was cut individually into shape and size and then glued into the respective openings on the upper flanks and under the engine. Finally, styrene sheet was used to create small spoilers and heat shields. The result is certainly not perfect, but comes close to what the real world arrangement would basically have looked like. In a final step, two air intakes for the two-stage supercharger, scratched from sprue material, were added to the flanks.
The cockpit remained OOB, simple as it is, as well as the landing gear, but the canopy was modified in order to allow a presentation in open position. This meant that the OOB canopy had to be cut in two parts and that the model’s spine had to be cut away, making place for a donor canopy (the late, bulged variant, IIRC from an Italeri Fw 190D-9). Internally the fuselage gap was filled with putty and the headrest had to be modified, too, but the conversion turned out to look better than expected.
As a small cosmetic improvement, the molded gun barrel stumps in the wing roots were replaced with hollow steel needles, and the outer guns were completely removed.
The kit and its assembly:
Another submission for the 2018 Cold War Group Build at whatifmodelers.com, and again the opportunity to build a whiffy model from the project list. But it’s as fictional as one might think, since the SM-12 line of experimental “hybrid” fighters between the MiG-19 and the MiG-21 was real. But none of these aircraft ever made it into serial production, and in real life the MiG-21 showed so much potential that the attempts to improve the MiG-19 were stopped and no operational fighter entered production or service.
However, the SM-12, with its elongated nose and the central shock cone, makes a nice model subject, and I imagined what a service aircraft might have looked like? It would IMHO have been close, if not identical, to the SM-12PM, since this was the most refined pure jet fighter in the development family.
The basis for the build was a (dead cheap) Mastercraft MiG-19, which is a re-edition of the venerable Kovozávody Prostějov (KP) kit – as a tribute to modern tastes, it comes with (crudely) engraved panel, but it has a horrible fit all over. For instance, there was a 1mm gap between the fuselage and the right wing, the wing halves’ outlines did not match at all and it is questionable if the canopy actually belongs to the kit at all? PSR everywhere. I also had a Plastyk version of this kit on the table some time ago, but it was of a much better quality! O.K., the Mastercraft kit comes cheap, but it’s, to be honest, not a real bargain.
Even though the result would not be crisp I did some mods and changes. Internally, a cockpit tub was implanted (OOB there’s just a wacky seat hanging in mid air) plus some serious lead weight in the nose section for a proper stance.
On the outside, the new air intake is the most obvious change. I found a Su-17 intake (from a Mastercraft kit, too) and used a piece from a Matchbox B-17G’s dorsal turret to elongate the nose – it had an almost perfect diameter and a mildly conical shape. Some massive PSR work was necessary to blend the parts together, though.
The tail received new jet nozzles, scratched from steel needle protection covers, and the tail fairing was adjusted according to the real SM-12’s shape.
Ordnance was adapted, too: the drop tanks come from a Mastercraft MiG-21, and these supersonic PTB-490 tanks were indeed carried by the real SM-12 prototypes because the uprated engines were very thirsty and the original, teardrop-shaped MiG-19 tanks simply too draggy for the much faster SM-12. As a side note, the real SM-12’s short range was one of the serious factors that prevented the promising type’s production in real life. In order to overcome the poor range weakness I added an enlarged spine (half of a drop tank), inspired by the MiG-21 SMT, that would house an additional internal fuel tank.
The R2-SU/K-5 AAMs come from a vintage Mastercraft Soviet aircraft weapon set, which carries a pair of these 1st generation AAMs. While the molds seem to be a bit soft, the missiles look pretty convincing. Their pylons were taken from the kit (OOB they carry unguided AAM pods and are placed behind the main landing gear wells), just reversed and placed on the wings’ leading edges – similar to the real SM-12’s arrangement.
The MasterCraft 300 is a twin-tipped dayboat, complete with deck area forward. It also has a clever, two-piece, tempered-glass top that allows both shade and fresh air. Photos by MasterCraft. To see more marine photography, go to www.madmariner.com. Para ver estas fotos en nuestro sitio en español, visite www.marineroloco.com
The kit and its assembly:
Another submission for the 2018 Cold War Group Build at whatifmodelers.com, and again the opportunity to build a whiffy model from the project list. But it’s as fictional as one might think, since the SM-12 line of experimental “hybrid” fighters between the MiG-19 and the MiG-21 was real. But none of these aircraft ever made it into serial production, and in real life the MiG-21 showed so much potential that the attempts to improve the MiG-19 were stopped and no operational fighter entered production or service.
However, the SM-12, with its elongated nose and the central shock cone, makes a nice model subject, and I imagined what a service aircraft might have looked like? It would IMHO have been close, if not identical, to the SM-12PM, since this was the most refined pure jet fighter in the development family.
The basis for the build was a (dead cheap) Mastercraft MiG-19, which is a re-edition of the venerable Kovozávody Prostějov (KP) kit – as a tribute to modern tastes, it comes with (crudely) engraved panel, but it has a horrible fit all over. For instance, there was a 1mm gap between the fuselage and the right wing, the wing halves’ outlines did not match at all and it is questionable if the canopy actually belongs to the kit at all? PSR everywhere. I also had a Plastyk version of this kit on the table some time ago, but it was of a much better quality! O.K., the Mastercraft kit comes cheap, but it’s, to be honest, not a real bargain.
Even though the result would not be crisp I did some mods and changes. Internally, a cockpit tub was implanted (OOB there’s just a wacky seat hanging in mid air) plus some serious lead weight in the nose section for a proper stance.
On the outside, the new air intake is the most obvious change. I found a Su-17 intake (from a Mastercraft kit, too) and used a piece from a Matchbox B-17G’s dorsal turret to elongate the nose – it had an almost perfect diameter and a mildly conical shape. Some massive PSR work was necessary to blend the parts together, though.
The tail received new jet nozzles, scratched from steel needle protection covers, and the tail fairing was adjusted according to the real SM-12’s shape.
Ordnance was adapted, too: the drop tanks come from a Mastercraft MiG-21, and these supersonic PTB-490 tanks were indeed carried by the real SM-12 prototypes because the uprated engines were very thirsty and the original, teardrop-shaped MiG-19 tanks simply too draggy for the much faster SM-12. As a side note, the real SM-12’s short range was one of the serious factors that prevented the promising type’s production in real life. In order to overcome the poor range weakness I added an enlarged spine (half of a drop tank), inspired by the MiG-21 SMT, that would house an additional internal fuel tank.
The R2-SU/K-5 AAMs come from a vintage Mastercraft Soviet aircraft weapon set, which carries a pair of these 1st generation AAMs. While the molds seem to be a bit soft, the missiles look pretty convincing. Their pylons were taken from the kit (OOB they carry unguided AAM pods and are placed behind the main landing gear wells), just reversed and placed on the wings’ leading edges – similar to the real SM-12’s arrangement.
details
Make: Mastercraft
Type: Ski/Barefoot/Wakeboard
Year of Registration: 1994
Engine: Manufacturer: Yamaha
Length20.01 feet
Beam8.01 feet
Construction · GRP
Underwater profile · Planing
I ordered this at www.banjohut.com last Thursday, it arrived the following Monday with standard free UPS shipping. With a little bolt tightening and tuning the instrument played very well. I am used to playing an Ovation Celebrity acoustic/electric, which has much heavier heavier strings, so after getting used to this for an hour or two, playing the Ovation required MUCH more pressure to hold the tune. The banjitar is dirrent from a traditional banjo in that it has the 6-strings and neck of a standard guitar, whereas a banjo has 5 strings; the thickest of which is actually shorter and mounts to the neck of the instrument near the 3rd or 4th fret (I think).
This was a blast to play with, and the customer service at www.banjohut.com was very accomodating. However the softcase (gig bag) I received (though free) is much too large for the instrument, so I will be purchasing a hard case for safer transportation.
Try to ignore the mess in my room, these past 2 weeks I have been 'kitty-sitting' and had boxes, clothers, and furniture stacked up to give the little guy some room to walk around, but not get into trouble crawling into spaces he shouldn't be!