1/72 SU-37 Terminator - Super Flanker

Gallery Article by Ashish Velankar on Sept 4 2020

 

      

The origins of this kit is a mystery to me.Its an old SU-27 kit with raised panel lines. I picked this as an incomplete model in a garage sale. There were no armaments, no landing gears, the wing tip rails were broken. It was painted in light blue color of the original SU-27 series.  It was lying with me for years in this state when I decided to upgrade it to a Super Flanker. 

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I had a fascination for Sukhoi's with canards and decided to convert this into a SU-37 Terminator. To accomplish this, I created the canards with a plastic sheet, rebuilt the missing wing tip rails and did some minor updates to the engine nozzles . The SU-37 has a unique camouflage and it took two days to paint. I used local Fevicryl and Camel acrylic colors. Since this was a conversion, I did not have any decals for the SU-37. All decals that you see are hand painted and it took another two days. Since the kit was with raised panel lines, I used a micro-tip pen to accentuate the panel lines. Weathering was minimal being a concept aircraft. Finally it was mounted on a Zvezda display stand. 

What you see here is a unique plane as this was a technology demonstrator for the canards, fly by wire and thrust vectoring technologies that are now part of all modern Sukhoi's including the SU-30 series and SU-35. The original SU-37 prototype crashed a few years after and only the model remains. 

You can check out more photos on my instagram handle ashish_velankar_scalemodels. Enjoy the photos !

Ashish Velankar

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Photos and text © by Ashish Velankar