We now
return you to our regularly scheduled modelling blather.
One
thing you won't find a great deal of in my display cabinets are Russian
aircraft. I'm not sure why that is. Admittedly, I'm a child of the Cold War,
and have never felt any sympathy for Russian political action. But then, I do
enjoy German WW2 aircraft, and I certainly have no love for their political
dealings either. Maybe it is just that I find Russian design to be
exasperatingly utilitarian. Most Russian planes have more in common with a
tractor than a bird.
But,
occasionally, one will work its way through the construction process. Since I
like prototypes, I've built models of the T-50, I-270, MG-144, and the J-10 and
J-20 (and yes, I know they are Chinese). I have the three Russian trainers in
process, though they seem to have stalled out a bit in the painting cycle. But
in general I have never spent much effort on WW2 Soviet types. I will admit to
having a Zvezda Pe-8 that doesn't seem to want to return to the stash, but its
eventual fate is still undetermined.
About
the only glimmer has been with postwar aircraft. I've toyed with the idea of a
set displaying the MiG lineage. Eduard's new MiG-15 was the primary driver of
that idea, along with the fact that I've never actually built a MiG-21, one of
the more common fighters on the planet. There is a good possibility I will get
around to that in 2014.
But I
digress. Today's completion comes from one of my other preferred themes, the
transitional periods in aircraft design. The Ilyushin Il-28 is a part of the
early jet period, when straight wings were still common and the full potential of
jet aircraft was still somewhat in the future. The type's first flight was in
1948 with aircraft entering service in the early 1950s.
The
kit is from Trumpeter, though it has been reboxed by Italeri. It is not a
difficult kit to put together, though for this particular variant you need to
do some cutting and pasting on the rear fuselage to provide a different tail
gun. If you are less hamfisted than I am, it probably will not be a problem,
but it did provide me with some frustrating moments. Measure twice, cut once,
indeed.
This
also happened to fall into the timeframe when I was having airbrush troubles,
so the spraying of overall Alclad caused a bit of hair-pulling as well. I still
don't think the overall finish is particularly good, but I was rapidly
approaching the point where it was more important to finish the model than to
establish my artistic bona fides, so that is what I did. The color scheme isn't
very imaginative either - another reason I'm not very excited by Russian
aircraft, but it did have the benefit of being simple. All in all, it
represents another scalp for the belt (ie, another model in the display case).
This
is completed model #439 (#4 for the year), finished in March of 2014.
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