1/144 Revell Antonov An-124 Ruslan

by Vladimír Žucha

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  Russia National Day 2006 

 

This is An-124 Ruslan built by me. I think the Revell's Ruslan kit is the world best airliner kit in the scale of 1/144. This kit provides many variants of Ruslan configuration for building concrete model. The most demanding is the last version with opened front and rear cargo bay doors. The cargo bay section is done very nice but there is also possibility to improve the interior section by adding the pipes, cables and additional covers of cargo bay sides. The marking can be selected from four airlines - Volga-Dnepr (two aircraft), Polet, Aeroflot and Russia air force. The accuracy of model is at good level, I found only two big inaccuracies in comparing with a real Ruslan. But they are correctable. The first mistake is the upper edge of main wheel bay. It's made too high. The second mistake is too narrow fuselage under the section where wings are joined to the fuselage. These differences can be seen on the photos of Volga-Dnepr Ruslans those you can find at the www.airliners.net where Ruslans are photographed from forward position.

This picture shows the bottom of Ruslan. The number of decals positioned onto the bottom wing surfaces is huge. Weathering was done using pastel chalk dust mixed with water.

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I decided to build Volga-Dnepr aircraft RA-82045, the configuration with closed cargo bay doors. I consider the coloring of Volga-Dnepr Ruslans as the most impressive. If you also decide to make RA-82045 I don't recommend to use the color scheme in instruction sheet. The coloring of real RA-82045 is different as that which is pictured in instruction sheet of kit. I recommend to use www.airliners.net photo database to make an accurate model of RA-82045.

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Another weak point of this kit is decal sheet. At the first look I was full of enthusiasm but I didn't expect so many problems and mistakes. I counted the number of decals necessary to put on model and the sum is approximately 580! The quality is very good as usual of Revell's kits. But the design of many decals is wrong. The big blue stripes of Volga-Dnepr are very inaccurate with the respect to the shape of fuselage. It was horrible toil to make the blue stripes to get the right Volga-Dnepr scheme. I had to use mr. mark setter several times to force the decals to stick to the fuselage. Further, the little red crosses for upper wing surfaces and for several another panels are too big (I assume that their size is more appropriate for the scale of 1/72) and too thick. The decal for black antireflexion stripe is totally unuseable. I had to make completely new shape what was not so easy. Then I cut a new decal of this shape from Propagteam black decal stripe and I used mr. mark setter to stick it correctly. I added the shape made by me and used on my model to this article. If you decide to use it, try the shape at the first and if it is correct then use it. I scanned the shape which I used and then I made the final picture using GIMP.

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For white section of fuselage I used Model master 1745 insignia white, grey for the wing surfaces is mixed using Humbrol set of grey colors and white.

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My model of the Ruslan took second place in the jet aircraft category 1/72 and up including at the Slovak international contest Plastic session in Poprad, Slovakia, which was on the 25th-26th march 2006. At the same contest my collection of airliners (This Ruslan together with Beluga and Airbus 380F) was awarded to the prize of "50 years of Revell" for Slovakia.

Vladimír

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Photos and text © by Vladimír Žucha