AJ-37 Viggen F7 Saatenes 90's

Tiger27 · August 7, 2015

1/48 , Special Hobby AJ-37 Viggen , F7 Saatenes Airbase sometime in the 90's.

So I'm at it again, this is my second Viggen, I have made one JA-37 but this time it's the Attack/fighterbomber version. AJ-37 short for Attak och Jakt, in swedish translates to Attack and Hunt , and transcribed to make some sense in English would be figher and attack variant. Oh, enough trying to figure out the swedish language although beeing very close to my native Norwegian, still has its' idiosyncresies. (to a Norwegian ,Swedish sounds just wierd)

This modell from Special hobby is more or less the same as the offering from Tarangus. However there are enough differences so you can't make a JA-37 out of the box from this kit..

Now the basic construction is fearly easy, PE for the cocpit is included and you don't really need any more than that to make the 'pit look busy. When it comes to "the tools of war" it's up to the modeller. If your' making your avrage day of training flight line jet , the Viggen rearly had any stores other than a fuel tank. No captive missiles or training ordinance was ever carried exept for live fire exercises. And as I'm doing a mid- 90's variant of the jet it was relativly clean and not to weatherd at all.

Very little modification is needed for the build, but be sure to check online refrences. However there is one major one that needs to be adressed. When the JA-37 was made it got a new and more powerfull engine, this caused the fuslage of the JA-37 to be extended a good 10 cm (4 inches). Now this translates down in scale to a few millimeters, but as it is fearly prominent on the AJ' so I chose to cut the modell down a size. Also I've cut off and repositoned the cannard flaps aswell as the elevators on the delta, these usually "sagged" when the plane was powerd down and the canard flaps was dropped when the landing gear was deployed.

There are provitions to do this as the parts that make up the front and rear fuselage has a gap that otherwise needs to be filled and sanded.. This gap is made for the Tarangus JA-37. The instructions does not say anything about it and the part needed for the JA-37 extention is not provided in the kit, so you can actually save yourself a fair bit of sanding and also get a correct lenght on your AJ.

Now for the "fun" part. Beeing a fighterbomber the AJ-37 retained the 4 color splinter camuflage that most Viggens got duriing the early days of service, later most JA-37s' was painted in a Gray sceeme, but the AJ was always "green". Now creating this sceeme is next to freakin impossible. Lucky there are some commertial options. Aztec has made a very nice set of masks for the JA-37.. Now as the AJ is a littlebit shorter than the Jacktviggen some sligth modifications of the masks in that area has to be made. No big task though. On the other hand what is a real PITA is actually paintng this modell. The masks make it alot easyer, but still , it's a helluva job. I've spent 5-6 hours every night for 5 strait nights to get the damn thing done.

I found the best way to paint this sucker is to start at one end and working your way, color for color, "patch" for "patch". After giving the modell a layer of Tamiya primer I sanded this down to a smooth surface and went to work. For this build I've used Tamya paint thinned with Tamiya Laquerthinner, this gives the paint a close to enamel hardness aswell as a decent drying time, as in not hitting the modell dry, but still not taking more than a 10-15 minute drying time.

this masking and painting really puts your patience on trial.. there are a huge number of masks to apply and paint, just take your time and go slow. To keep a relative momentum I chose to work more than one place. Laying down the color areas for one color from the trailing wing area on both wings , then starting the nose and workng my way back. Make sure always start at one end and making your way from there. . Othervise there is no way in hell you'l get this to work. Never ever lay down one color, try to fix all the masks for that color over the entire modell, and so the next and try to fit the masks , that will not work, trust me.

Once the main sceeme is finally done make sure to be carefull when taking the masks off. there will be some errors that need to be corrected, when you see one, deal with it before ripping of the next mask. This will save you the headacke of remaskning with tape and correcting. also try to get the masks off as whole as possible, if you need to correct it's easyer to reapply the mask before correcting (hope I'm making sense here)

The rest of the modell was completed in pritty much the same way as any other. Decals are very ok to work with and although there are quit a few they go on fearly easy.