1/32 Trumpeter Su-27B

Gallery Article by Christian Villa on July 26 2011

 

Hello everybody,  I’m Christian Villa, from Milano Italy, this is my second submission to ARC.  The first one was an F-104 ASA-M some years ago.

The model itself no need presentation, it is well known and surgically dissected both by the model an aeronautical community world wide.

I had to “thank” Masa Narita, which gave me the inspiration to build such kind of “aeronautical mammouth”,  I followed step by step his WIP, and I learned much about the model and HOW to BUILD it,  I didn’t know there were a 1/32 model of this plane before.  I was surfing the net, looking for some information about it, and I ended for chance on his site….it has been love at first sight.

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It is my favourite plane, and I put in it almost all the aftermarket available, the project at the end cost an arm and a leg...but it paid well!!!

The pilot, came from MasterCaster’s, from England, the wheel bay and cockpit tub, ejection seat are from Aires, air intake and nose cone provided from Zactoman.

For the stencil I used a decal sheet from Begemot (a Russian firm which makes decals for Russian plane and in particular for this subject, but not only…superb quality, several hundred decal.  It took much time to set the whole stencil than to build the whole model..almost!!!).  When I noticed Lindenhill, came up with Su-27 decal sheet depicting lot of different, let me say “special colors”, I couldn’t let them go away..my model depict RED01,from Nivenskoye Air base...Guardian of the North.

The building wasy straight forward, the model is big…. and when assembled really BIG, it’s difficult to handle when during the assembling process.

The Aires wheel bay especially for the main landing gear needed a lot of sanding to eliminate the big amount of resin cast, in the upper surface, to let them enter their location.  The front bay it’s ok, and doesn't need any sanding.  Same speech for the “pilot office”, the side of the cockpit tub required lots of sanding and dry fitting before setting it in the fuselage, anyway Aires did a master piece in detailing.

The Zactoman air intake are superb, but to install the Zacto resin, you will be required to do a bit of cutting and sanding on the Trumpeter kit to eliminate some part of the lower surface, to let resin intake to fit properly.  In particular to eliminate a big gap in the rear part of the resin intake and the Trumpeter kit part, I had to use epoxy putty, because Tamiya’s one recessed, and Zacto resin didn’t fit perfectly.  In the end the job was worthy of the effort.

The same for the nose cone, it fits well to the upper part of the fuselage, but the lower one had to be filled with epoxy putty, which is stronger and doesn’t shrink, sanding and rescribing the panel line and riveting of the area.

I didn’t love Trumpeter's decision to use hinge, for rudder, slat and flap, I fixed with cyano glue, without using it.

The windshield, is narrow size than the fuselage, so I had to put a thin piece of plasticard inside to fix the problem and to allow the windshield take the right shape.

For paint, I used Model Master enamel paint series, dedicated to Flanker, except for the blue, Model Master color were too light in my opinion, so I used Model Master sky blue.  In many pictures I observed depicted the planes which this blue, instead of blue provided for the Flanker series…I preferred to use this.

I faded the single panel adding some drop of white in each color, real planes are very dirty, due to the extreme climate condition of Russian territory, which Flanker are called to operate...extreme heat and brief summer, and more extreme cold winter, especially in the north...Russian plane are dirty and warn...especially Flanker...mine is not an exception.

Engines were painted with Alclad.

Once the painting phase was completed, a layer of future, one week later, decaling, a second layer of future to seal the job, then weathering with oil color to highlight panel line and rivets.

The whole model took about six months to complete.

Hope you like it and feel free to give me your feed back and critics over my work, excuse me for the poor quality of the pictures.

This is my personal tribute to Russia!!!!

Thanks to all of you!!!  Next project is a F-104 G Hasegawa 1/32 in Italian nuclear strike of the early sixties!!!!

Christian Villa

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Photos and text © by Christian Villa