etched parts that are to be itted in wheel-wells,
and in engine nacelles, on the landing gear and
inside air intakes.
After my battle with the etched parts, the
instructions call for ixing the fuselage halves
together, and with an airframe this large a few
problems might come up at this point - and
well yes, they did. Either the airframe halves
on my kit were warped, or there was an issue
with the tooling here, but after dry-itting,
aligning, mis-aligning, twisting, squeezing
pushing and pulling, I settled on
the fact that there would
be some sanding and
illing – then moresanding again before it
would be something that
resembled an aircraft. Next,
the instructions called for
installing the nose cone and
the front landing gear, but for
the moment I settled for just the nose cone.
Normally these models with a nose-wheel
require a little extra weight in the nose, and
I added forty-grams of lead - just to be sure.
When dry-itting the nose I immediately saw
that it was too wide, so out came the sanding
materials again. The tail boom and a section
between the twin-tails was then removed
and the gap illed with styrene to give me a
foundation to build on. There are not many
reference images of this plane available, so I
tried to replicate the aft section of the Su-27
to a point with a little artistic license. So, using
plenty of iller I modelled the rear section, and(^66) SU-27 FLANKER B WWW.MODELAIRCRAFTMAG.COM