Scratch building a Firefox in 1/300th scale
Construction - Stage One
This little project started out when I was looking at writing some scenarios
for the C21 ruleset, by Wessex Games. I though it would be fun to have a Mig31
Firefox to use for fictitious scenarios. The Mig31 designation has been used
since by a real life aircraft, the Mig31 Foxhound, but this is a totally different
plane fro the movie aircraft, as it is based on the Mig25 Foxbat.
Since no one makes a 1/300th scale model of the Firefox I looked around for a model
that would be similar and that I could use for as a start. The choices I narrowed it
down to was a Su47 Berkut or a Su27 or Su35 Flanker. With either model, a lot of
hacking and remodelling would be required and I wondered if it would be easier to
scratch build to whole thing. Luckily I only need to make one of them!
The base plane
Here's the model before I began any changes. The tail and rear exhausts are reasonably close to the firefox and the leading edge of the wing looks similar. I used some of the images from the ThinkRussian website and rescaled them to 1/300th scale, based on the dimensions they have in their drawings.
First step - Remove the wings
This photo shows the berkut with the wings chopped off. I just used a pair of large sidecutters to take them off.
Step 2 - Reshaping the body
In this photo I'd started to file the wings and leading edges back to get a better shape and to make it easier to fix some new wings on. The area around the exhausts were filed down a bit but the need to be tidied up a lot. I used a large woodworking file which hacked through the soft metal quite easily. I also filed the tail to make it thinner as the model suffers from the "fat wing" syndrome of a lot of Navwar planes.
Step 3 - Some serious alterations!
After looking at some more pictures, I decided the shape and the front of the wing didnt look. So I used a big file to hack away the front of the wings and take it right back to where I thought the top engine intakes would start. I also filed along the side to create a rough shape of the engine enclosures. The large file left some rather deep marks so I've will use a smaller file to get rid of these scratches and I can fill any deeper marks with green stuff.
Coming Next
In the next part I plan to shape the engine intakes, add a dorsal spine with some green stuff, and shape and lengthen the nose.
