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Polly...Polikarpov....A Whole Flock Of 'Em In 1/72


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I got a bit sick around the end of last year, leaving some projects unfinished. When I got better, I wanted to do something simple, a good kit out of the box, and get it done pretty quick. I also wanted to put a new build up in the case at my local hobby shop, and wanted it to be a kit I had bought there. This led me into a bout of building Polikarpovs, step by seemingly reasonable at the time step. After six weeks, this was my bench:

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Wife did the dragon over-looking it all; it is folded up from a printed sheet, and I rather like it.....

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The build that started it was an ICM I-16 type 24. My local does not stick a lot of kits, and they are mostly modern types, or the most popular WWII items. I did find this on their shelves, however, several years ago, and snapped it up immediately. It is finished as the machine generally described as that of Lt. Safanov of the 72nd Inependent Fighter Regiment (a naval formation) at Murmansk, though it may not, in fact, have actually been flown by him --- he was, however, photographed standing beside it. There is some question what was actually on the starboard side of the machine. It In any case, it was written off as un-repairable in late July, 1941.

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The kit did go together very well. I added a bit of sidewall detail in the cockpit. Fit was very good. I think it is a bit over-engineered in the nose. The red of the decals was unfortunately translucent, and I had to paint over them with red. The starboard inscription decal also fractured badly, but I was able to make it work well enough. A very good, even relaxing kit, taken all together....

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So I thought then, I will build one of the biplanes. The I-16 is often described as the successor to the I-15 biplanes, but actually they were simultaneously designed, and early I-16 types were produced en masse before any model of the I-15 biplane was. The original I-15 was not very popular in the Soviet air service; visibility for landing was particularly poor, and it was fragile owing to extreme care taken to lighten its weight. It was, on the other hand, spectacularly manouverable. Less than four hundred I-15s were built, with almost half being shipped to Spain. But I wanted to do a Soviet example, to set off the late model I-16 just built. The ICM Soviet boxing kit I had on hand had decals for a machine of the 15th Independent Air Regiment, at Pskov, near the border with Lithuania, in 1938.

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The kit is good, so not so 'sweet' as the monoplane (I build mostly biplanes, so that is not the reason). ICM provides a good deal of interior detail in their new-tool biplanes, and in my view they have over-reached a bit. The instructions concerning where things are go are not very clear at all: the sidewall framings do not fit very well, and they are very fragile: they broke in several places just under normal handling. In future (and I will build more of these) I will make my own frames from stock rod. The fit of the upper wing, which I was worried about, was very nice and clean. The kit omits exhast stacks, which I made, and also I also added some turn-buckle fairings that are quite obvious in photographs but omitted from the wings. Fit of the 'I' struts was kind of tricky, and much seam finishing was needed where they mate with the wings. The side window pieces in the kit are not too good, but I lost one to the carpet monster, and cut new ones from some packing bubbles. The decals had the same problem as before, and had to be painted over to look properly red. One serious adventure was managing to knock the instrument panel loose after most of the model was complete: I got it out of the cockpit, glued it to the end of a toothpick, and managed to poke it back into place from the open nose, with a good length of toothpick remaining in the model.....

Edited by Old Man
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While the family resemblance between the I-16 and I-15 is clear, the later biplane versions were much more strikingly similar. And so I thought I would do an I-15bis, the first mass-produced I-15 variant. I remembered, too, that I had bought on many years ago at the shop, well before I was even building models again, having seen it while there with my daughter to get supplies for a school project, and thinking I would have killed for a model of such a subject when I was building as a kid. It was the first kit I bought there, and the first for ages, and when I got it home I took one look at it and said to myself, if you try this now you'll only botch it. So I figured now, I will dig it out, and did, and this is the one that has actually gone into the case at the hobby shop. The unit and even precise date are not known, but it was photographed on the Leningrad front, during the first winter of the Siege. The I-15bis went into production late in 1937, serving in mixed ubits with monoplanes, as Soviet air doctrine dictated. They were mostly out of front-line fighter service by the time Hitler invaded, but kept on for some while as ground attack machines.

For some reason this first shot came out with a real winter quality to it....

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As this old-tool kit has been pretty much superseded by the new version, there is not much point to comment on fit and such, though these were fairly good. Some comment I have seen says the cabane struts are too long, but after builkding the thing, I suspect the true case is that the inter-plane struts are too short, and I fear the new kit (after measuring the relevant parts) may be perpetuating this error. I botched shortening the cabanes to match the interplanes, and wound up making my own in replacement. I gave the thing a coat of green and applied the white over that, to get a field distemper feel to the thing. The rigging on the skis is somewhat simplified.

Edited by Old Man
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And so at this point, I wanted an equal number of monoplanes and biplanes. So I resorted to an A-Model I-16 type 5 I had. One of my long-range projects is to do some Chinese Polikarpovs, and some Nomonhan examples, which will require Type 10 variants (an odd omission in the available models), and I figured now was a good time to get the hang of the A-Model I-16, since either a late model (ICM) would have to be back-dated to a 10, or an early model (A-Model) would have to be up-dated to a 10, and it would be foolish to decide which without having some experience of both kits. The kit call-outs also described 'red 64' as being in an aluminum dope finish, so I could have four separate finishes (two greens, a white and a silver). But it turned out 'red 64' is actually white, at least on topsides, and also was on the Leningrad front in the first winter of the Siege, coming down on frozen Lake Lagoda on December 10, 1941. The I-16 type 5 was a world-beater in its day, the most advanced fighter in the world when it went into production in 1935, but by 1941 it was decidely obsolescent. This machine was almost certainly brought forward from a training school, and fitted with rocket rails for ground attack duties. It is unclear whether it was actually a type 6 (as the windscreen would indicate), or simply fitted with the new part at some point in its career. The landing gear seems to have been rendered fixed, not uncommon in training units (manually winding the gear up and down led to many accidents).

Again, one shot managed to come out with a distinctly wintery air....

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The A-Model is one of those instances where there is a good model there in the kit's parts, trying hard to get out. It is a limited run kit, and not, repeat not, for beginners. But with care you can get a quite nice model out of it. I was surprised by how well things fit, once all flash and unevenness in mating surfaces had been cleared away. Repeated test fitting and work on mating surfaces will pay off, especially with the wing pieces. The only bad seam was the upper surface wing joints with the fuselage; gaps were at least a quarter millimeter. The clear parts in this kit are ghastly; thick and damned near opaque. I worked the wind-screen thin with knife, and various grits of sand-paper, mostly on the inside, and finished with baking soda on twists of wet paper towel, and two or three Future dips. I made my landing gear from scratch: those in the kit are moulded to gear doors, which were absent in the subject of the model. But scratching the landing gear for this is probably a good ides anyway, as the doors are awfully thick. The cockpit arrangements are not too bad, though, and can be made to work without much trouble. The rocket rails are scratch-built.

Edited by Old Man
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  • 2 weeks later...

Nice collection of Polikarpovs. I imagine these are some pretty small kits in 1/72. I agree with your sentiments on Amodel kits. They are rough on the edges and need a boatload of cleanup, but you're rewarded with a subject nobody would touch in kitform (like the Amodel Kamov Ka-15 series of helicopter kits). Again, terrific work!

Cheers,

Alby

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Nice collection of Polikarpovs. I imagine these are some pretty small kits in 1/72. I agree with your sentiments on Amodel kits. They are rough on the edges and need a boatload of cleanup, but you're rewarded with a subject nobody would touch in kitform (like the Amodel Kamov Ka-15 series of helicopter kits). Again, terrific work!

Cheers,

Alby

Thank you, Sir. They are indeed 'pint-sized' models; you can easily fit all four on a standard sheet of typing paper.

One thing I did not notice till I had the pictures up on a large monitor is the clouding on the Type 24 and the I-15. On display in the living room the finish appeared nicely weathered, but it seems from the picture display I got the ratio of flat-base to Future wrong. I will put a coat of straight future over them, which should fix the matter. The Soviet paints were glossy when new, so even if the fix comes out with a little shine, it will not be a problem.

I have a couple more of the A-Model Polikarpovs, and two of their other kits also, an Avro 504K (I intend, anyway, to convert it to a 504C), and a Nieuport IV monoplane (to be given floats for a Mediterranean example).

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