ICM 1/48 Yak-9 by Doug Holliday

ICM's 1/48 scale
Yak-7DI/9

by Doug Holliday

Yakovlev Yak-9

Airfix's 1/72 scale Hurricane Mk.I is available online from Squadron

Introduction

It has been many years since I last submitted anything to Hyperscale – my daughter was born in 2000 and I believe it was prior to that!

I had many projects that were started and now that my girl is 13 I hope to find time to finish them!

How the years go by…

Anyway, I was showing my daughter some of the planes that I had built and we were taking them out of the display case to dust them off – and I decided that I was going to build one – because the winter this year in Michigan was brutal and there was nothing else to do!

Construction

I sifted through my collection and the old ICM Yak-7DI/9 (early) jumped out at me. I had never built a Yak, so I thought, well, I’m just going to throw this together the easy way and not get too crazy with it – just to get my feet wet again. Didn’t happen that way. After doing some extensive web research, I decided to purchase the old Eduard photo etch set for it as well as a Rob Taurus canopy and corrected prop/spinner from Vector.

I had a set of True Details wheels that were incorporated.

The Eduard set includes a lot of cockpit detail and went in with no problem. I used the kit dash with the decal even though Eduard supplies a new one. I scratch built a new gun sight using styrene bits. The seat was usable, but I had to thin the back to bring it more to scale.

I drilled out the fuel filler windows and added some printed from scaled-down drawings I found on the web (clear plastic discs glued over the top using Kristal Klear). I also drilled some tiny holes for the gear-down indicators that were crafted from stretched sprue. The elevators were cut off and dropped a bit using the tip of a No. 11 blade.

I modified the wing-tips to represent the squared-off wing of a Yak-9 using scale drawings as a guide and cut-in new receptacles for lights. I filled in the Yak-7 fuel filler doors on the wing and scribed new ones further inboard.

I scratch built a new chin scoop and tail gear doors. I also added some plumbing in the wheel wells and gear legs. I drilled out the hole to accept a scratch built cowl gun barrel.

The overall fit of these ICM kits is very fiddly, but if care is taken to fit, re-fit and re-fit again, everything can be brought into square. Tamiya putty was used to fill the seams.

Finally, antenna wire was added using invisible thread attached using CA glue.

Painting and Markings

The model was pre-shaded and finished with Tamiya acrylics – freehand, using an Aztek A470 airbrush. The decals are a combination of the stock kit items as well as some spare stars from 2 other sheets.

Weathering was accomplished with Vallejo model wash (oiled earth) applied with a fine brush and paint chipping done using a silver pencil.

Microscale Micro Satin was used as a final finish.

Conclusion

I was very happy with the results, it’s not perfect, but it felt great to finish a kit after so many years.

I hope you like it!

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