Su-33 Bort 78 - Build

Tommaso S
Wow fantastic paint job in there!

Michael Phillips
That is really coming along beautifully! Really nice paintwork there and some great detail work.

Alexander
Thank you both very much!

Clifford Keesler
Awesome looking so far.

Mark D
Great job on this one, can't wait to get it out of my stash, a beautiful aircraft. Any bigger problems you ran into?

Alexander
Thanks for the comment Mark.

Actually, quite a few - you feel under closer observation and during the build that the whole CAD-design and such is a bit unfinished:
1. The joint between the radome part and the forward fuselage leaves a considerably large gap - at least one one side - that needs to be filled, since the parts do not align perfectly with each other (as can be seen on picture 20)
2. There were some wrongly labeled parts on the landing gear, though I do not remember which of them - they were small. Not a big problem, but look more closely at reference pics to be sure
3. The instruction says to install the front landing gear before assembling the two fuselage halves. I didn't do it, but it required some modifications later to somehow get the landing gear in and bend it into the correct position (that was on me, but on the other side it is poor design that such a step is required imo)
4. The whole wing flap mechanism isn't particularly good: the holes were orignially too small for the actuator parts to fit, so I cut out some material in the side parts. Maybe if it wasn't to big afterwards, the actuators would have hold the wings on their own, but this way I had to bend two metal needles and put them into the front wholes on this whole mechanism as to balance the flapped wings
5. As seems to be the case with all Flanker models (though I do only know from others), the whole engine intake is not perfect, it requires a bit of bending/holding the parts in place by force. Moreover, there is a small step between the to-be-installed parts and the molded in part of the lower fuselage part in this area (seen for example on pic 21)

I think that was basically it, certainly more trouble than I anticipated based on the beautiful (but in some areas inconsistens, as in shallow) detail.
If you want good reference pics, here are links to some very good workarounds - at least for landing gear, that's what I focused on:
- scalemodels.ru/modul..mp;show=12&min=0
- walkarounds.scalemod..3_details/?g2_page=1

I hope I was clear enough in my descriptions.

Mark D
Thanks Alexander for your clear input here, always good to know which items need some extra attention. About the links: yes, I've already downloaded these photos, ? it's a great reference.

Alexander
No problem at all, I hope this will help in your build.