Pilot Replica 1/48 Saab J.29B

The SAAB J29 was a Swedish single-engine jet-powered fighter aircraft developed by Svenska Aeroplan Aktiebolaget (SAAB) at the directive of the Swedish Air Force. The prototype first flew on September 1, 1948. The aircraft was delivered in versions A, B, C, D, E, and F and saw military service with Sweden and Austria from 1951 through the early 1970s. Despite the airplane's decidedly rotund appearance ( it was nicknamed Tunnan (barrel)) , it was fast and nimble and examples were used to set multiple international speed records in the early 1950s. Unfortunately, and in common with most other early jet fighters, the J29 had a high accident rate.

The type's only combat use came during the Congo Crisis in the early 1960s. The crisis was a period of power struggles and severe unrest that began when Congo was declared independent from Belgium. Internecine fighting began almost immediately as the province of Katanga wanted its own independence as the State of Katanga. The degree of disquiet led to the Congolese government to ask the United Nations to send in UN troops for assistance in ending the fighting. In response to a request from the UN, Sweden sent 9 J29s and 2 S29s (reconnaissance version of the J 29) to Leopoldville in the Congo where the detachment became known as United Nations Fighter Squadron Number 22. The J29s were initially tasked with escorting UN transport aircraft and defending against attacks from Katangese aircraft, but soon went on the offense by attacking Katangese airfields and ground targets. By January 1963 the fighting had largely ceased. Two J29s and two S29s were flown back to Sweden. The rest were destroyed on site as they were no longer needed due to newer aircraft becoming available.

The kit has 90 parts molded in light gray styrene, eight parts molded in clear styrene, and eight photo-etched brass parts. A four page instruction sheet illustrates 19 assembly steps. A separate four page sheet provides full color painting and decal placement guides. Color call outs are referenced to Tamiya, FS595, Humbrol, and Vallejo. The photo-etched parts provide seat belts, shoulder harnesses, and rear view mirrors. The clear parts include the separately molded canopy and windshield, the lenses for the landing lights, and the covers for the wing tip position lights. The flaps, slats, air brakes, and ailerons are all molded separately. The surface detail is a mix of engraved panel lines, recessed rivets and fasteners, and raised areas representing access panels/hatches, etc. The three decal options provided are all for UN Fighter Squadron Number 22 J29s. The kit has a high level of detail and, in common with most other recently tooled kits, has a high parts count with many sub-assemblies comprised of multiple separate parts. Although, I tend to prefer high detail/high parts count kits, this kit's parts breakdown made assembly very tedious and increased the chances of having alignment issues. For example: all three landing gear legs have separate upper and lower torque links, The torque links have to be attached to each other at tiny contact points and then attached to the landing gear legs. The kit's fuselage assembly also has some overly complex engineering. The fuselage is divided into forward and rear sections broken at the transport joint. The rear section is split vertically and incorporates the vertical tail. The forward section is also split vertically, but then is divided quarterly along the horizontal axis. The forward fuselage also has some separate panels that appear to have been for access to the cannons. However, the kit does not provide anything to go behind the panels, so, unless the builder fabricates some bays and equipment, the panels will need to be attached in the closed position. Further complicating the forward fuselage assembly is the need to trap the cockpit tub and the nose and main landing gear bays inside when the six parts that form the exterior shell are joined. In the review kit, one of the forward fuselage quarters was warped. I considered returning it to Pilot Replicas for replacement, but I was unable to find any contact information in the kit or on their website and ended up working around the warp by clamping and gluing during assembly.

Pilot Replicas offers a number of aftermarket accessories for this kit and I used some of them. I also used aftermarket accessories from other manufacturers. These include: Aires 4725 SAAB J 29 Tunnan Cockpit set, Quickboost QB 48 967 SSAAB J29 Tunnan Front Landing lights, Maestro Models MMK 4940 SAAB J29 Tunnan masking set, Master Models AM 48-071 SAAB 29 Tunnan Pitot Tubes, and from Pilot Replicas; 484007 Drop tanks without fins, 48R008 Seamless Jet Intake, 484015 Nose and main wheels set, plus 48R013 Tow Bar

I also used a couple of 1 mm AK Interactive white lenses. Note: none of these aftermarket parts were essential to building the review model. I happen to enjoy using aftermarket parts and in most cases they add additional detail and/or ease the building process.

I started construction by running a scriber through all of the recessed panel lines. I do this on all of my builds to facilitate the oil paint pin wash applied later in the painting/finishing process. The next step was to test fit the one piece Aires cockpit floor and rear bulkhead with the upper forward fuselage walls. Surprisingly, the fit wasn't too bad and I only had to sand off about .5 mm from the edges of the floor and bulkhead. However, test fitting of the lower fuselage walls revealed the need for the thickness of the underside of the cockpit floor to be reduced by about 1.5 mm. Once I was satisfied that the cockpit would fit inside the fuselage, the rest of the cockpit was assembled per the Aires instructions with one exception. Both the kit and the Aires set provide photo-etched seat belts and harnesses. I'm not a fan of bending and attaching photo-etched seat belts to conform to irregularly shaped ejection seats, then painting the belts, and picking out the tiny buckles and hardware with 10/0 paintbrushes. Instead, I cut the buckles and hardware off of the Aires belts, made new belts from tissue paper colored with a green Sharpie, and attached the homemade belts to the Aires buckles. The paper belts folded over the ejection seats much more realistically than any photo-etched belt could and were closer in scale thickness to boot. I painted the cockpit (including the instrument panel) with a 50/50 mix of Tamiya acrylic XF61 Deep Green and Tamiya XF71 Cockpit Green. I picked out the various knobs, buttons, levers, switches, and panels with red, black, silver, and white per color photos that I found on the internet.

Before installing the cockpit and closing the forward fuselage, the main landing gear bays need to be attached to the fuselage sides. Ordinarily, this would be a simple task, but the previously mentioned warped forward fuselage quarter caused a need for much test fitting, copious amounts of superglue, and the biggest clamp in my tool set. Even with the bay securely in place, the warp was not entirely eliminated, and when all of the forward fuselage parts were joined, it caused a discernible step. In fact, none of the forward fuselage parts fit very well. I had to thin the sidewalls of the nose landing gear bay to get the lower fuselage quarters to close around it and all of the separately molded hatches left sizeable gaps and steps where they joined the fuselage. The gaps were too large to pass off as panel lines and I ended up filling them with superglue, sanding smooth, and re-scribing the panel lines. Likewise, the lower forward fuselage half left big steps where it joined the upper half. The step on one side was so big that I sanded clear through the part trying to get the mating surfaces flush. More filling, sanding, and re-scribing followed. With the forward fuselage more or less in one piece, I filled the remaining space around the periphery of the inside of the forward fuselage with 1 ½ ounces of pewter scraps from some metal model car kits. I then test fitted the aftermarket seamless intake to the fuselage. It would not clear the cockpit floor. By carefully sanding down the fairly thick wall of the intake I was able to reduce the outer diameter to where it no longer fouled the cockpit floor. After the intake was in place, I sanded down all of the seams on the forward fuselage and re-scribed any panel lines that had been eradicated. The forward most piece of the jet pipe has to be trapped between the halves of the rear fuselage before they are joined. Once the jet pipe was installed, the rear fuselage halves were glued to each other, the seams were sanded smooth, and the panel lines were re-scribed. The forward and aft fuselage halves are attached to each other at the location of the real aircraft's transport joint The aft fuselage has a raised flange that runs around the circumference of its forward edge and the aft edge of the forward fuselage half has a groove running around its circumference. This appeared to make for an easy join of the front and rear fuselage sections, but when the parts were mated, they had different cross sections which caused big steps at the attachment points. Since this joint was on a prominent panel line of the real aircraft and there was raised detail adjacent to the panel line, I didn't want to fill, sand, and then replace eradicated detail to eliminate the steps. Instead, I used a micro chisel to deepen the groove on the front fuselage section and reduce the depth of the flange on the rear fuselage section. After I was able to get the two sections to mate without steps and with a gap that would pass as a panel line, I glued them together with medium curing superglue and applied a big clamp to maintain the now matching cross sections. The fuselage was largely complete at this point.

The flaps, ailerons, and slats are molded in upper and lower halves. They assembled without issues. The ailerons are designed to operate. I'm not a fan of working parts on my models and I cut off the parts of the hinges that enable the movement of the ailerons. The wings are also molded in upper and lower halves and assembly was without issues. The wings join the fuselage by tongues and grooves and, although the fit wasn't bad, there were still gaps that had to be filled, sanded, and eradicated detail restored. The horizontal tail plane is molded in one piece and fits into a groove at the base of the vertical tail plane. The fit here was very good and no filler was required. Each wingtip has formation lights on the leading and trailing edges. The lights on the leading edges have colored bulbs and transparent covers. One of the covers was missing from the review kit and I made a replacement from a length of the kit's clear parts sprue tree. The airframe was now complete and it was time for paint and decals.

The kit provides three decal options. Two are for mostly natural metal aircraft and one is for an aircraft in a field applied camouflage. I decided to go with the camouflaged machine. The topside camouflage is a brown and green segmented pattern with randomly applied orangey tan stripes. The colors appear to have been sprayed freehand and there is very evident over spray. The underside was left in natural metal. I first sprayed a coat of Tamiya gray lacquer primer. After the primer was dry, I buffed it with a 4000 grit micromesh cloth. I then sprayed a coat of Tamiya gloss black lacquer on the areas that would have a natural metal finish. I used Alclad II Aluminum as the base finish and masked off and sprayed various panels with Alcald II Dark Aluminum, and White Aluminum to simulate a natural metal finish. Pilot Replicas provides FS595 approximations of the three camouflage colors, but I decided to use my own interpretations. I used Green Drab and Pale Brown from Hataka's Orange Line (lacquer) Modern Swedish AF Paint Set Vol.1. For the stripes I used a 50/50 mix of Tamiya Acrylic Orange X6 and Tamiya Acrylic XF59 Desert Yellow. In retrospect, the Pale Brown looks a little too light and too pink . If I was to build the model again, I would shoot for something closer to WWII RAF dark earth to approximate the brown on the real aircraft. I sprayed the model with a coat of Tamiya X22 Clear and applied the decals. I had to carefully measure and slice the “UN” insignias on a diagonal where they crossed the slat's and flap's intersections with the wings, but otherwise, the decals worked perfectly. One nice touch was that the kit came with two sets of stencil decals, one set with clear backgrounds for the NMF decal options and another set for the camouflaged aircraft with silver backgrounds to simulate where the camo had been painted around the stencils. When the decals had dried, I applied a Paynes Gray oil paint pin wash to the panel lines and other recessed details. I let the oil paint dry for about 48 hours and then gave the model a coat of of Tamiya Acrylic XF86 Flat Clear.

I wanted to use the Pilot Replica's aftermarket main and nose wheel set. I assumed that the wheels would simply be straight across replacements for the kit parts. They are not. The aftermarket set includes an all new pair of resin main gear legs that differ from the kit's main gear legs. The kit's legs have the brake rotors molded onto the legs themselves, but the aftermarket set has the rotors cast onto the wheels. I didn't want to use the resin gear legs as I had learned from previous experience that they buckle over time. So, I sanded the rotors off of the kit's plastic gear legs and drilled out the center of the aftermarket wheels until I was satisfied with the fit and alignment. The nose landing gear is comprised of a two piece mud guard, a leg, two torque lengths, and the nose wheel/tire. All of the contact points in this assembly are tiny and I was concerned about its ability to support the already heavy model. I ended up drilling into about ½ the length of the gear leg, through the mud guard and into about ½ the diameter of the nose wheel to insert a steel pin. Even with the extra support, the nose landing gear is kind of wiggly and flexible when the model's weight is on it. I then added the main landing gear, gear bay doors, and the torque links. The tail pipe has a “sugar scoop” fairing at its aft end. The fairing in the kit had a radius that did not match the radius of the tail pipe. I clamped the fairing around a wooden dowel that had the same diameter as the tail pipe and held it in the steam of a boiling teapot for about 30 seconds. It took two of the steam treatments before it fit the tail pipe properly. I finished up adding the ancillary details to the underside of the model by attaching the drop tanks, nose landing gear bay doors, and the landing lights. Turning the model over, I attached the main instrument panel and gun sight to the cockpit coaming before gluing the whole assembly to the fuselage just forward of the cockpit opening. The canopy guide rails were attached to each side of the cockpit and the canopy opening/closing mechanism was glued to the turtle deck. The ejection seat was a very tight fit and I was concerned that it might need to be cut down, but with some determined effort (and a few curse words), it finally settled into place. The kit provides 3 rear view mirrors on the photo-etched set, one on the bow of the windshield and two on the bow of the canopy. I could only find photos showing the one mirror on the canopy bow and I used a mirror from an Eduard set that has mirror finished photo-etched parts. I could not find any photos showing J29s with slats, flaps, or air brakes actuated, but because the kit provided them as separate parts, I decided to finish the model with the slats and flaps partially down and the air brakes open (they actually fit well in the closed position). The model was completed with the addition of the canopy, windshield, the dorsal antenna, the pitot tubes, and the tiny position light lenses on the aft ends of the wingtips.

I have mixed feelings about this kit. It is nicely detailed, has exquisite surface detail, and excellent decals. On the down side, the distinctly odd engineering of the forward fuselage caused unpleasant fit issues. I estimate that I spent about 25% of the total time it took to build the model dealing with the fit issues on the forward fuselage. I also thought that the differences between the kit's landing gear and the aftermarket landing gear were puzzling given that they were both made by the same manufacturer. I think this kit is probably the best 1/48 J29 on the market, but I wish it had been easier to build.

Robert Hart 

26 November 2024

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