Mikoyan-Gurevich 3

Jonkka
Proceeding faster with this one as LaGG is in it's final stages and there's more time while waiting between detailings.

ARK quality is not that different from ICM, except parts seem to fit better and details are rather nice. Flash is abundant and instructions are exceptionally vague.

Jonkka
Tubular frames for cockpit and engine keep me busy (and with engine it's somewhat pointless as I am not going to position cowlings open so most of the engine will be hidden). But for practice I will construct it completely.

Also, trying new ideas with oil washes, tomorrow will tell how I succeeded. Unfortunately, camera battery went dead so pictures will come tomorrow also. What, you don't buy my excuse? Ok, I simply forget to take pictures.

Jonkka
Ah, yes. I've been building this couple of evenings without update report. Fuselage halves have been successfully glued together with cockpit and engine tubs in between. I must say that even though I was a little skeptical after dry fitting those, the actual gluing went well and Ark Model's fit was much better that anticipated.

Now I am constructing wings which are made of unusually large number of parts, for example wing roots are not molded in the wing itself but are not one but two separate parts. This means that fit will be tricky but given success with the fuselage I am feeling confident.

Jonkka
First pic of this project. As you can observe from the picture, it seems that on lower wing half the trailing edges are incompletely moulded (see wingtip and part on the left of the aileron). I am trying to remedy this with sprue shavings melted in thin cement as an easier/better alternative to putty.
Also visible is wheel well with oil wash.

Jonkka
Major session with white paint (takes surprisingly long to cover anything with that), to which I added little gray to make it off-white. Photo does not do justice to painting, unfortunately, it looks too gray here.

Martien Lourens
For me the ARK Mig 3 was a nightmare 🙂 This one I'm going to follow

Jonkka
You're welcome. I expect to be able to present finished model in a couple of days if painting and detailing goes smooth (and weekend won't bring any distractions).

Jonkka
Right, it's complete and here are some pictures. This time I decided to do relatively clean paint scheme despite the fact that white winter camo gets dirty easily.
Correcting the incomplete mouldings in the wing trailing edges was a complete success, but I made couple of mistakes elsewhere. For example the arrow decal on the sides are on wrong sides (left on right and vice versa), luckily it's hard to notice as differences between them are subtle. Bigger issue is landing gear which did not have locating holes and I had to glue it straight to wheel well bottom and got them somewhat out of alignment compared to each others.
Anyways, that was first Ark Models kit for me and perhaps because low expectations, I was pleasantly surprised by it. Not top notch quality, obviously, but given the low price it was great value for the money.

Martien Lourens
Great job Jonkka.👍