The Little World

When life gives you MiGs – you make MiGaid…

You research the internet until you find a real picture of the model you have in the box. Colour, for preference, and well-lit if possible. You can make do with older B/W photos but be wary of other people’s colourizations or the precise artwork of virtual games and web sites. They can lie to themselves as well as you.

This is a model of the MiG 21 in Cairo Air Museum. It is shiny gloss because that’s what the real one is – no matter how silly that would have been in service. We are talking preserved aircraft here. Paint and be damned, Achmed.

How far the EAF went in camouflage copy of their enemy is a moot point- or how far the Israelis went to do it the other way. There are a couple of schemes for EAF and IAF that look remarkably similar and I wonder who spoofed whom. I would be willing to bet there was a good deal of footling with the IFF codes and machinery.

The white markings at the nose are particularly pleasing – white lettering defeats me sometimes. In this ase I drew out a plan for the Arabic lettering at 2 X size on the computer. I made the letters cocoa brown like the front of the aircraft.

Then I reduced them to 1 X on a small sheet of clear decal paper and went over the lettering carefully with white paint in a box pen.

Once dry, the decal could be wet and slid off onto the brown without any excess showing. Now all I need to do is find out how to do this with uniform and regular lettering. The goal is out there and somehow we will achieve it!

PS: The old Hasegawa decals were cactus – I scrounged…