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White 34

Building a winter camouflaged Yak-7B in 1/48 scale

by Patrick Chung

This is my ICM 1/48 Yak-7B “White 34”, depicting an aircraft (of unknown pilot and unit) in Leningrad front, circa spring 1943. I choose this subject simply because of my personal taste of the very attractive, partially removed, winter temporary camouflage scheme.

ICM’s kit features basic details of Klimov M-105 engine, both two 12.7 UBS machine guns and 20mm ShVAK cannon that firing through the prop hub. Other ordnance include 6 RS-82 rockets mounted on the under wing pylons. The overall fit of the parts were fairly good and had provided an ideal foundation for further detailing. However, there were some parts that suffered from either sparse details (around cockpit area, engine compartment as well as wheel wells), or incorrect shape (i.e. the small intakes at each wing root, oil cooler face and outlet, clear wind shield frame, spent chute ejection ports missing, etc).

Construction started with adding rivet details to the overall exterior surfaces, including front fuselage, main wing root and underside inspection panels, as well as empennages, using a good scale drawing as reference. The smaller 0.2 mm rivets were made by a home made riveting tool consisting a brass rod handle and a steel pinion keyed into the front end with sharp teeth. The bigger circular ones were made by means of special drill bit made from syringe tube of proper diameter with a bevelled end. These processes were repeated several times, with thorough sanding and cleaning in between to ensure surface smoothness and enough depth of rivet detail.

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After that, the fuel gauge on each fuel tank cap were made using a section cut from clear spruce with the dial faces carved and painted from the backside. The clear sections were then securely glued from the inside of the upper wing parts and then sand flush with wing surface and polished.

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Various scratch built details were added into the cockpit floor and side walls according to the drawing and other references, including gun trigger on the control column, foot rails on each side of the cockpit floor, a small rectangular recess for the joystick, oxygen bottle, radio gears, seat belts, rudder pedals, throttle quadrant, knobs and adjusting wheels around side console etc. An extra 80 gallon fuel tank was also added from scratch to the second cockpit floor.
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The copper wire cable from radio set was left to extrude from the tiny hole drilled out on the clear canopy frame, serving as a strengthening core for the antenna mast.

The engine compartment was next to receive detailing. This included extending the steel tube frame up to the front end of the fuselage as engine mounting flanges, adding compressed air inlet pipes and ignition wires to each side of the engine block, making bolts fastening notches and corresponding bolts on the cylinder block covers, as well as some other tiny scratch built devices here and there. Then ammo boxes for UBS guns and a glycol tank was fixed to make the compartment looks busy.

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The engine cover had been thinned heavily from inside using a motor tool to let it accommodate those details. The kit parts for the UBS blast tube needed trimming to rest exactly to the front mounting frame.
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Modifications of wheel bays included adding three mounting plates each for landing gear and hydraulic retracting mechanisms plus inner cover retracting levers. A canvas cover was also fixed on each corner of the fuselage side.

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Hydraulic cylinders and brake lines for the gear legs then made and glued to the kit parts. The entire tail wheel assembly as well as the tail wheel cover was also rebuilt to represent better details.
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Other places also detailed at the moment include the oil cooler and radiator with scrape PE parts as radiator faces and steel wires added as flap actuating arms.

After painting and weathering of the interior, the entire airframe was assembled, sanded and cleaned. Small clear lights (landing light and navigation lights) were also fixed at the time to let them sanded exactly flush with the wing leading edge. Polish and a drop of Future should bring them crystal clear again. They were then carefully masked using Tamiya masking tape and/or Gunze liquid mask to protect them until the final touch. Hinges lines by means of stretched spruce cut into tiny pieces were added to the large panels on each side of the front fuselage. As this was a distinguished feature on Yak fighters, ICM strangely overlooked this important detail.

Another important, yet again omitted detail was the chute ejection ports on each side of the upper wing root close to the windscreen. These were represented by using a fine chisel to “dig out” the plastic carefully, paying attention to the angle of the opening. The Individual exhaust stacks were hollowed out and carefully aligned to the cylinder block through the openings, clear canopy frame corrected and polished was then cemented to the fuselage with the antenna wire end from the radio super-glued through the frame. Wood grain was lightly carved on the surface of the aft canopy surface and then applied with a light wash of burnt sienna artist oil colours (I prefer Windsor and Newton for their fine grain), this area was then painted sandy yellow before receiving the interior blue-gray colour with the rest of the frame—all because the aft canopy on the real machines were covered with plywood, not celluloid.

When time came to pick out a painting scheme, I surfed the web and finally decided to let my model depict this “White 34”, an unidentified aircraft. I personally tend to like the type of winter camouflage more than those of the standard and uniformly addressed summer scheme as there always much more room for subtle weathering.

An AII Green/Dark Green camouflage was first applied with the Blue underside colour. A custom mix of Gunze lacquer paint was sprayed freehand with Testor’s Aztek 470 airbrush. When dry, flat white was applied over the camouflage. Careful planning was critical at this stage as not to paint the white too opaque and even, especially at those areas as leading edge of wings and empennages, wing root and area adjacent to the cockpit. Further processes of desired result were done by careful sanding and touch up spraying with a very thin mist of the original camouflage colours. Exhaust stains, fuel and oil leakage and other dirty stuff then applied to respective areas. Restrained paint chipping was also applied to where as appropriate. The number 34 on each fuselage side were hand painted.

ICM’s decal was thin and matt, a little brittle and translucent. Fortunately there were not too many decals to bother with since only red stars were used.

After a thorough wash of black/brown oil colours thinned with Zippo fluid, a clear semi-flat protective coat was applied to seal everything in. Antenna mast, undercarriages and tail wheel/wheel bay covers and related small details were super-glued in position. Antenna wires were made by 0.14mm monofilament fishing lines and painted with metallic paint.

After some 100 hours logged, the finished Yak looks satisfactory. I also have a 1/48 Mig-3 from ICM with pretty much substantial documents in hand, and maybe it will become my next VVS subject in the near future.