**** DONE: 1/48 MiG-3 "Black 12" - Allied Manufactured Aircraft

Enjoy your trip!

The package is scheduled for delivery today so I may be able to get some sprue shots up before the weekend. The trip to Central Asia is a mission trip with a team from my church. It's my first overseas mission trip so I'm excited/nervous. My pastor is quite familiar with the region as his father and mother served as missionaries in Kazakhstan. It didn't really dawn on me until now... there is a connection between this particular plane and the region I will be visiting!

Have a good trip John. Sounds like quite the adventure.

The kit plus a few other modeling goodies arrived in the post yesterday so I thought I'd report on the contents. I apologize in advance for some of the pictures being blurry. Lighting wasn't great and I was in a hurry... perfect combination for crappy photo results.

The Trumpeter box is a top-opener... yay! I really don't like the side opening boxes of my last two kits (Revell 109G-10 and Flying Machines G.55). Sprue trees are separately bagged for the most part with one bag containing two trees.


Here is the tree containing the fuselage pieces. The MiG-3 is a small plane so this will be one of those "petite" builds.


Scribing is finely rendered. Trumpeter has chosen to show rivet detail as well.


The shroud over the exhausts is a bit thick and will look better if thinned down or cut off and replaced.


More rivets. Hmmm... I'm not sure how I stand on them honestly. We'll see what they look like with a coat of paint. The control surface detail is definitely overdone IMO and I'll probably be scraping and sanding the hard edges down.


The wing sprue... wheel wells are molded into the wing bottoms with some molded detail.


A closer look at the wing bottom. The rivet detail is especially heavy here, almost to the point of distraction. I'm not sure if the wheel wells would benefit from some added details... anyone have any good photos?


Sprue holding the prop assembly and landing gear components.


Exhaust pipes have some flash that will need to be cleaned up. The ends are solid so they'll need to be hollowed out but thankfully, they seem to be circular in cross section, which will make it easier.


Nice detail on the landing gear struts.


Closeup of the wheels and landing gear doors.


Sprue with other miscellaneous parts including cockpit.


Cockpit sidewalls and floor has good detail. It should look decent with a paint and a wash.


A closeup of the ailerons. Like the tail stabs, I think the fabric detail is too heavy and I'll be sanding the hard edges of these ribs down.


Clear parts including wing lights and gun sight.


Decal sheet. Hopefully I'll be able to use the red stars from this sheet for Black 12.


The instructions come with a nice color sheet showing the camo/markings of three aircraft.


The instructions themselves are in black and white and appear to be pretty clear. I really like the clean and uncluttered look!



The Quickboost landing gear covers were part of the same shipment.


The kit gear covers have nice detailing on them but are very thick. Their complicated shape and the presence of details on both sides, makes modification difficult.


Quickboost separates the folding gear doors into separate parts and they are noticeably thinner.

I built a 1/32 version of this kit a number of years ago now, and I remember it fitting well, minus the poseable surfaces which just flop around if you use their rod system. I can't speak to the accuracy though.

Never built a Trumpy kit. Always thought the surface detail to be over the top.

Thanks for the preview John. I have the kit myself so will be watching closely. Hopefully without too much fuss, backdated to a -1, Luftwaffe captured. I have some books at home so I'll post anything I can find about the wheel wells when I get back on Wednesday.

Geo

Doesn't look too bad....

Thanks for all of the input guys! I couldn't help but take a closer look at the kit and start on a few things. I fitted some brass tubing to replace the plastic gun barrels. Is the center gun a bigger caliber? I could use a bigger piece of brass tubing if that's the case.


The kit exhausts are solid so they need to be hollowed out. They pipes are circular in cross-section so it's much easier than some of the oval and squarish exhausts that I have had to deal with in the past. I used a sharp Xacto blade to start the hole and a small pinvise drill to finish it off.



The small rockets carried under the wings are surprisingly represented in multiple pieces... rocket body, tail and racks molded separately. The tail fins are (understandably) a bit blockish so I thought I could thin them down. It looked pretty good but I can see from the picture that I can thin them down a little more.



I'll probably start on the cockpit when I get back. Any thoughts on the cockpit color?

Even Russians don't know that themself.

Nice details John.

Thanks for the comments guys!

Wurger said:

Even Russians don't know that themself.

Click to expand...

I guess I have leeway in color choices then!

I'll leave this build for now and resume in a couple weeks!

There's a Mig site Wojtek pointed me to last week that might have some answers. Plus there is a Russian aircraft site that I posted on one of Jeff's builds that had cockpit interior colors. Unfortunately I can't access my book marks in camp.

Geo

Here's the Mig site, it might have a link to the Russian site...
MiG-3 family

I know both of these sites Geo. However , the more I go into the MiG-3 colours the more I'm becoming convinced the cockpit interior was of more colours than it could be guessed. I would say there were two basic schemes , the pre-war light one with light indicator panel and the second dark one for MiGs with the black panel. But we should remember about problems with paints that hit the Russian industry soon after the German attack. Also we have to be careful with these pics of wrecks or restored kites because their cockpits were repainted so many times it is almost not possible to state what colour it was.

Good work so far!

In addition , I would like to pay your attention to the lack of two small inlets on the top engine cowling. These small air intakes can be noticed in the image with the Red02 and the Black12.

Hello my friends! I've been away for a while but now I'm back. I've not yet had a chance to jump in fully back into modeling but I've done a bit of minor work on my MiG-3 that I can report on. Based on Wurger's always excellent findings, I thought I should address the scoops on the cowling. The scoops are there but are molded too small based on the photos.


The molded scoops were carefully scraped off with an X-Acto blade and sanded.


I found some tiny faired scoops from my G-55 that were not used so it was a simple matter of cutting them to size and hollowing out the ends. The yellow tape is in preparation of hollowing out the small scoop on the front of cowling.



A small drill and X-Acto knife was used to hollow out the front scoop.


I'll probably be starting work on the cockpit soon!

Looking great.

However I would say these scoops should have been moved more back ( a little bit behind the panel line between the engine top cowling and the fuselage top ).