1/48 Trumpeter MiG-19PM

by Sean Brzozowski

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  Poland Independence Day 2005  

 

For a quite a while I was thinking about making a shiny, silver jet.  One of the models that I had in my stash was MiG-19PM from Trumpeter.  I also had an aftermarket resin detail set and decals (the latter from Hi-Decal; allowing me to make a mandatory :-) Polish version, not available from the box).  Everything seemed to be under control...

Unfortunately, it turned out that the money spent on the resin set was utterly wasted.  One part (containing front landing gear bay and front equipment bay) simply didn't fit.  The "nose inset" was too small and the equipment bay was of a wrong shape.  On top of that, other parts didn't improve enough over the plastic ones to justify a hassle of trying to fit them into the model.  The only part that could be used was an ejection seat, but, by that time, I decided to make this model out-of-the-box.

I started, as usual, with painting the cockpit.

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A process of build itself went fairly quickly.  Unfortunately, my initial worries about this model being overengineered turned out to be justified.  Trumpeter decided to produce models of as many variants of the plane using as little number of sprues as possible and split some parts of the model into way too many parts.  This, combined with the quality of the plastic used by the Chinese company, caused quite a few parts to fit less than acceptably.  In of itself, it shouldn't have been too bad.  It simply took more than the usual amount of putty, CA and polishing.  The problem was the NMF finish, which exaggerates even the smallest flaws in the quality of the surface.  When I was finally done, I was so happy that I didn't have to polish plastic anymore that I simply forgot to restore at least half of the panel lines "destroyed" during the polishing process.

Fortunately, the rest of the build went rather smoothly.  After thoroughly washing the model (to eliminate even the smallest specs of dust, fingerprints etc), I painted it with glossy, black enamel from Model Master.  On top of that went three separate thin layers of Alclad White Aluminum.  After letting it dry for a couple of days I masked individual panels and painted them using three other shades of Aluminum: Duraluminum, Polished and Dark.  Next was the nose (painted Dark Green - Model Master #1710) and all internal parts (painted with custom mixed dark grey).  Luckily for me, initially I mixed more of the dark grey that I needed.  This saved me some time later, when I needed to paint some small parts that I forgot to paint in the very beginning.

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The first picture above clearly shows the contrast between different shades of aluminum.  The "dark" one is a little bit too dark, but the contrast is not stark enough to force me to repaint :-).

The rest of the build went without a hitch.  I put decals directly on Alclad and after treating them with Sol they practically became part of the painted surface.  I cut as much as I could of the clear carrier from the side numbers and the rest almost disappeared. 

Sean

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Photos and text © by Sean Brzozowski