MiG 15UTI

The plane:

The MiG 15 caught the west by surprise. Previously, soviet jet fighters had been primitive, with technology well behind their western counterparts. That all changed with the MiG 15, partly due to captured German research into jet fighters, partially because the British decided to give the Russians a technological boost by sending over the Rolls-Royce Nene engine. The MiG 15 actually outclassed US frontline fighters which naturally annoyed the USAF and sent US designers scurrying to their drawing boards looking for a way to beat it.
The MiG 15 was not in service very long with the mother land, but apparently as recently as 2000 some examples still flew in third world air forces.
The MiG 15UTI is the trainer version fitted with a double cockpit.

The Model:

Another of those great things you find on eBay, this is a rather old Czechoslovakian kit from KP (Due to Cyrlic letters, their logo actually looks like 'KM'). I'm not sure how old the kit is, but the box looks pretty aged, and the instructions point modelers to issues of a Polish model magazine from 1978 for ideas of colour schemes.

I've been reading Al Supercinsky's 'Kit Corner' columns on Internet Modeler recently, in which he talks about building models from the 50s and 60s - this model reminded me a lot of his articles. The parts count is small, the panel lines are raised and it came with a flying base! What more could one want from a cold war era model of a cold war fighter built behind the Iron Curtain?

Construction was fairly straight forward, but the fit wasn't. I spent a fair amount of time getting things to mate up. Sure, there were locator pins, but they were... odd. The locator pin holes on the fuselage actually broke through the surface they were so close to the edge of parts!

There were no locators for the cockpit so I just lined it up by eye. The two halves of the mold for the joysticks were so badly out of register I'm amazed they actually met at all, and the detail was fairly sparse on the instrument panels. No one's going to see it through that thick canopy anyway, right?

I did leave a few things off the model - there should be a couple of antenna-ish things under one wing, but they were badly molded and I didn't bother. There certainly should be an antenna projecting in front of the wing - it was actually molded to the upper half of the wing but it snapped off easily... I also didn't bother with under carriage since I had my heart set on the flying base!

Two problems with he flying base.
1 - You had to cut the slot of it in the fuselage yourself and I sort of over did it...
2 - I snapped it anyway...
So I just went ahead and used the remains to build my own flying base!

The paint job was achieved with Tamiya and Citadel colours, heavily weathered and beaten up with various techniques. The decals gave me some trouble. The Polish markings went on easily, the number decals on the nose both tore. So I replaced them with some GW Imperial guard numbers which looked just right. They also tore... I got another set of GW numbers and this time they didn't tear, thank Glod.

This model reminded me of how lucky we are as modelers today. We can get our hands on kits which are reasonably priced and just fall together. Mold making technology has progressed a lot, people actually seem to think about how to design the models, things fit first try... It's a long way from the kind of kits the late Al Supercinsky discussed in his column, but it's also a lot of fun building up one of these old kits. I wasn't born until the early 80's so I missed out on all the fun of the early kits, but having read about them in various places I'm very interested in them. This little kit helped give me a feel for how things were back then, even if it was made later, in the soviet union, and wasn't made from metallic green plastic! A fun build, but not a kit I'd enter into a contest - for that I'd need Tamiya's 1/48 version!