Hobby Boss 1:48 Scale MiG - 17F Fresco

[Sdkfz250]

So, having introduced myself yesterday, I decided that today I shall introduce you to both my model making skills and my entry for the From Russia With Love GB in the form of the glorious (if I do say so myself) Mig - 17. Fair warning to those of you who love after market additions, or building the entire engine of an aircraft only to hide it inside the fuselage never to be seen again, neither will be included here.



There is the entire kit out of the box along with the original decals, which for the aircraft I am planning to reproduce will not be used and as such I am waiting for the delivery of a separate decal sheet will which be shown later. So into the building process we go and per following the instructions I started with the cockpit and forward splitter, I found the fit of all the parts to be rather acceptable though upon putting the pilot's seat into the 'tub' I noticed it did sit at a slight angle against the back of the cockpit and needed a little extra sanding to make it flush and not obstruct the hole for the joystick. I made a bit of a school boy error in gluing the seat in before painting, which made it a little more awkward and something I will not do next time around. Also I managed to mix up my orientation when putting the splitter together and glued the lower part of the assembly in upside down, as shown in the first picture below.



Though I soon after corrected it before the glue fully dried and then took a second picture to show the correct assembly after a bit of chuntering, something something "evolved species" something something.



From there I sprayed Tamiya XF23 Light Blue onto the wheel wells, the internals of the landing gear assembly and onto the cockpit as well.



After leaving that to dry whilst enjoying a nice cup of tea and some cold leftover pizza from the previous day I went back to paint over some of the cockpit equipment along with the seat cushions and the instrument panel in Citadel Base Abaddon Black, once this had dried I highlighted the inside of the cockpit with Citadel Mithril Silver (now known as Runefang Steel) and finally gave the entire thing a wash of Citadel Shade Nuln Oil.



The rear half of the engine assembly and exhaust was assembled, though I noticed during assembly that the groove for one section had no lug to fit over and as such was just arranged to the same angle as shown on the instructions. The inside of the assembly and the rear end of the outside was then painted with Citadel Boltgun Metal (now Leadbelcher).





This brought to a close the end of (a short) first day working on the MiG - 17 and I look forward to hopefully being able to assemble the wings, tail and fuselage halves tomorrow.

[Avgas]

I've heard various things about this kit which have held me off from buying it so am watching with interest. I love your paint names though, aircraft paints have esoteric names like 'Olive Green.' I mean, not exactly a stretch of the creative imagination is it. (I always thought Olive Green should have a counter in something like Popeye White.)

[Sdkfz250]

I will agree on that, I like Games Workshop for a lot of things, especially paint names. Nothing quite like painting something with Snot Green instead of Olive Green/Drab. Makes me not want to repeatedly bash my skull against something when I have to paint another American or Russian WW2 vehicle in green. As for the quality of the kit, so far it hasn't needed too much filling, there will be a bit in tomorrow's session though, of that I am sure, just a question of how much.

[Sdkfz250]

It's almost like I knew that fit issues were incoming and you know what, I was right. I looked up the word Fresco to see if it was another word for "Arse" which apparently it's not, it's a painting style instead, go figure.




As you can see on both of the above images, the tail section needed a little bit of filler at both ends after being glued together, also I had to remove all of the pins on the tail as they caused a misaligned fit if pushed into the holes on the other half of the tail, only the pin directly under the vertical stabiliser was left on.



Thankfully the elevators fit well with the horizontal stabiliser, though I did have to sand off a little bit of the end for both of the long pins on the elevators themselves to get them to fit flush. Also the leading edge of both wings required very precise cleaning up and sanding and multiple dry-fits to make sure no gaps are left, despite this I still had a gap in the centre of the leading edge of the right wing pictured above, which was fixed with a bit of extra plastic weld and some patience. Thankfully the flaps and ailerons fit almost perfectly into the wings without trouble afterwards.




The problems arose when it came to putting the front half of the fuselage together, the cover over the top of the intake and the nose wheel housing cover were both difficult to fit and required a lot of sanding to the splitter assembly in order to get low enough to fill their position on the aircraft, also placing both halves of the front together was a little awkward and had to be glued in two separate stages to make sure it all sat together. The engine assembly fits snugly into the back of the tail, so well in fact that simply by pushing it into place I couldn't remove it again, so a small amount of thin glue secured it completely.



The end of the second day of work was made entirely worthwhile however as I could finally try a test fit for the wings and both halves of the fuselage, only a minor amount of sanding was required to the front wing lugs to get them to fit into the slots for them in the fuselage halves.




There hopefully will be a second update coming out later tonight with the work I managed today, as all of the above was done on the 18th.

[shortCummins]

looking good so far

[DBMiller]

Wow, that kit sure gives you some difficult seams to work with! Good luck!

[Sdkfz250]

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, children of all ages...let's get ready to rrrumble!



The gun housing is finally on and down as it should be, again there are noticeable join seams for this part as there most likely will be for most of the aircraft, it doesn't matter to me though, the F-16 is still uglier.



Oh tail-sitting aircraft, why must you plague me so? I had to put 35 grams of weight into the nose of the MiG to keep it from rocking back and it is this experience that makes me even more happy I chose to leave the majority of the engine assembly out.




Wings finally glued in place onto the nose assembly of the MiG, the fit was nice and thankfully there were no issues with the locating lugs or holes for them during this stage of the build. Though those nice seam gaps are becoming like an old acquaintance now, time to do something about that...






Right, now we've got those issues dealt with and out of the way, time to tidy this all up and glue both halves of the plane together and see if the wing roots fit as well into the tail as they did into the nose, here's hoping.




Well I'd call that a resounding success, come fellow comrade communist of Vietnam, we have gift for you, take take. What you mean there's still a gap to fill...?






Another seam defeated by glorious Soviet thinking and might! (Though one would think the Vietnamese had to pay extra for this service on their "gift"). Either way, I once again have my sights set upon finishing the MiG off.



Just not quite like that...

[Willem]

Looks like a bit of a handful with all those gaps. Nice work on overcoming the problems though.

Continued success mate.

[Sdkfz250]

So having decided to fall up the stairs (screw gravity) and mess up the already stereotypically ruined British teeth arrangement. Right, on with the show.



As you can clearly see the join for the wings to the fuselage needed more filling done as there was a minor fit issue.



The wheels for the MiG-17 were painted Warpstone Glow and the tires were given a coat of XF-85 Rubber Black.



Ordanance and fuel tanks were then assembled and tidied up ready for painting along with the hardpoints.



Cockpit was then glued onto the model and masked, the canopy framing is not very well defined and was hard to follow the framing edges.




I then started pre-shading the panel lines of the model before spraying on XF-23 Light Blue to the underside and lower sides of the MiG as seen below.

[Always48]

Great work so far, its been i eye opener for me as i also love this little jet and have that kit to build one day. looking forward to seeing it painted up

[Sdkfz250]

Now time for applying some paint, the MiG was marked up with blu-tac according to the lines for the camouflage scheme I had chosen prior to starting the build, for which I had ordered some extra decals. Working from the lightest colour to the darkest. (Sand > Green > Brown > Black)







Here she is once all four colours had been applied and the blu-tac 'sausages' removed. Thankfully there was only a tiny amount of over-spray.







The colours were then highlighted, in the case of the sand, green and brown, a bit of white paint was mixed in with the original colour, meanwhile the black was highlighted using a different colour, XF-85 Rubber Black, the model was then given a coat of Tamiya X-22 Clear. The highlighting work and the wash can be seen in the second image, the wash was left on the aircraft for a day to dry completely, then wiped off.





Attempts were then made to apply the decals purchased specifically for my chosen aircraft, but they were so thin that they wrapped around the decal paper and could not be transferred to the model itself, which was very disappointing. Because of this I went back to using the original Russians stars supplied with the kit.

[Willem]

You picked a cool scheme and you've done a great job on it.

Lovely stuff.

[Always48]

What a great and different colour scheme to see the mig 17 in. love it

[Schoof]

NIce job !! But remember two weeks left