1/72 SAAB Viggen prototype 37-4

Gallery Article by Björn Bäcklund on June 6 2014

Sweden National Day 

 

This is the fourth prototype. The first prototype had the wings rebuilt to incorporate the "saw tooth" but this was the first one to have it as built. It is the Frog SAAB 37 Viggen in a Hasegawa reboxing. Since it can only be built as one of the three first prototypes there isn't really any good reasons to buy it. The Red Viggen boxing cost about 25 Euros here but the kit is wrong for those decals. I bought it really cheap just for the decals without any plans to build it but I changed my mind and decided to build it anyway. Not as the red one but as prototype number four. Instead of throwing it away I built it as prototype #4. I built the "saw tooth" from plastic card with new radar warners on the wings.

 

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The two missing pylons on the fuselage was taken from an Airfix kit. I added a seat and instrument panel from Heller's kit. The Heller kit could be built as a two seater as well as an single seater so I had some extra seats and also used an instrument panel from Heller. I thought the end looked a bit bare. Just a wide and shallow hole so I added the exhaust from the Airfix Viggen Well as the 37-0 mockup don't have an engine, just an plain pipe I decided to make something for the 37-4 prototype. Now I slipped in a piece of the old Revell F-16 engine in the Hasegawa model to make it look like it has an engine while the mock up will just have an blank tube. 

Since this and the Airfix kits are of the prototypes No. 1-3 the only scheme for them are aluminium. I used Mithril Silver from Citadel (Games Workshop) It was very nice to use and I feel it has the slight grey hue that SAAB used. So the old No. 4 is done. As you see it wasn't much that needed to be changed to have an slightly different version. I am looking at the possibility of building one of the camera pods that was used during the test flights.

Björn Bäcklund

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Photos and text © by Björn Bäcklund