ICM 1/48 MiG-3

Much has been written and posted about the Mig 3 on the www. Googling (or whatever is your favorite search engine) will provide a huge amount of information on the subject, suffice to say The Mig 3 when introduced was one of the VVS newest and advanced fighters, with exceptional performance at high levels but lacked maneuverability and performance at lower levels. 

Construction as usually the case with Aircraft models started with the cockpit, now I’ve only switched to 1/48^th scale models in the last 6 months or so and this is my second or third ever 1/48^th scale model, coming from 1/72^nd scale where I cost get away with slapping everything to gather and painting it green wasn’t going to cut it on this one so more care and attention was needed with washes and detail, considering I don’t have the patience to normally spend too much time in the ‘pit’ I think for an OOB type model the detail supplied by ICM is enough, the only thing I added was some homemade belts and buckles in the cockpit and a few bits of detail on the fuselage walls.

I had decided from the beginning of construction to install the engine on this one so it was assembled and carefully painted and drybrushed to highlight the details, trying to get the mounts installed and in the right place called for a degree in patience, yoga and 16 fingers.

Once everything was painted the fuselage was closed up and then I moved onto the wings, boy talk about making thing complicated, it looks like ICM wanted to make it almost impossible to assemble the 13 piece wings without filler and lots and lots of naughty words, however if you take it slow and glue, tweak, bend, scrape. Glue, tweak, bend rinse, repeat you might be able to get it all together without destroying the fuselage detail in the process.

With the main construction now completed I could reward myself with some of the easier bits like the huge drag inducing radiator box under the fuselage and assembling the props and undercarriage.  

The ICM decals are pretty much useless as I had discovered from building the ICM Yak 7, however I did try once or two of the decals just in case …. Yup sure enough they touched water and went “poof”, 16 million shards of decal slowly float to the side of the dish.  ‘Sigh’ . Now that the kit decals where off the menu and my stash of 1/72^nd scale decals where not going to be much help I needed a simple generic scheme for the Mig.

Many years ago I had built a Mig3 in the white winter distemper and red wings but wasn’t happy with the overall effect in the smaller scale so I decided to try it in the larger scale, after searching the Interweb thingy I discovered the original photo showing a lineup of ½ doz Migs painted this way, towards the back of the photo one of the Migs had a no13 on the tail, stars and that was it.. nice and simple,

I first sprayed the upper surfaces with a generic green as a base for the distemper, filling my airbrush with thick undiluted  tamiya white I randomly sprayed a thick white coat in areas of LEAST wear, once that was dry I emptied half the paint out and added the same amount of thinner and proceeded to spry the rest of the upper surfaces until I reasonably even coat was achieved. The Red was masked off and spayed the same way, IE the trailing edge of the wings where treated to a thick coat and the leading edge a thinner coat.

I left everything to harden up for a couple of days then broke out the toothpaste to do the weathering. I used a gritty type of toothpaste and added a dab onto the pad of my finger and proceeded to carefully wear my way through the white and red, paying careful attention to areas of high wear and leading edges, carefully wearing the white away until the underlying green primer started to show though the white and red and in some places right the way down to the aluminum.

Once I was happy with the effect I used the home inkjet printed decals that my good mate Jim in OZ had printed up for me on his printer, being inkjet printed they where thin and slightly “washed out” in colour, once applied though they looked just like faded paint! A most excellent effect, Thanks Jim.

Well apart from the jigsaw puzzle, migraine and naughty word inducing wings the ICM Mig was a excellent build, I was really happy with the final outcome and for personally it turned out to be one of my better builds, Ok the marking aren’t quite historically accurate and I’ve used a lot of artistic license in where the red on the wings finish and the weathering as I didn’t have access to a huge amount of information etc I’m still happy with it.

Thanks to Mike Horrell for the ICM kit. 

Interweb thingie

Mark Fordham

 July 2008