1/48 Hobbycraft MiG-23

by Mukund Vora

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This is my first article on ARC although I have been a regular visitor to ARC.  This MiG 23S was built by me nearly 10 years ago and in it’s original form, was totally inaccurate, especially the  nose profile, which bore NO resemblance to the real thing.  Three years ago I bought an after-market version from Kazan to convert the MiG-23S to a “MLD”

This was a good and highly detailed product with one flaw :- the nose cone was again too small in diameter.  All MiG-23 versions after the ‘S’ had a larger and deeper nose profile, thus the profile from Kazan was wrong (this could be because to fit a larger diameter nose cone, Kazan would have to supply a new nose section entirely and they really need to work on the clarity of the transparency –it’s really sad ).

Click on images below to see larger images

Anyway, I cut the nose section from just in front of the cockpit shroud and fitted a turned piece of plastic in its place which was of the correct diameter.  This wasn’t easy as the cutting and rebuilding was done to a finished model!

After sanding and crazy-glue filling till my fingers wore out, it did finally worked, as you can see from the photos.  It also entailed cutting the tail and replacing it with the ‘MLD’ tail and other parts (too many to mention here) and fitting the excellent cockpit.  The airbrushing was tricky as the old paint scheme had to be finely sanded down so that there would be no thickness difference between the old and new paint layers.

The decals are bad as they developed cracks pretty soon after application, but it was impossible to change them as it would mean repainting the kit a THIRD time!

Hope you like the finished product.

Mukund

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Photos and text © by Mukund Vora