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Hello all🙂 This beautiful painting by Mauno Selin shows a typical mid-winter scenery of Utti AB where all Il-28s and C-47s were based. No hangar space was available for large aircraft and so Iljushins were kept and serviced outside during the time span of 21 years they served with the Finnish Air Force. Il-28s carried registration markings NH; not for Nikita Hrutshov as quite many people believed but for Neuvostoliittolainen Hinauskone (Soviet Towing plane). However the aircraft soon got a nick name that lasted: Nikita. One of my dreams fulfilled (Christmas came early) when Bobcat Models released their 1/48 scale kit of Il-28T which is the torpedo bomber variant. You can easily build the bomber variant straight out of the box with minor modifications. Hi-Decal Line provides very nice decals for the Finnish bomber (NH-1) as well as for other options. The reconnaissance variant however, requires more work; quite a lot actually. I decided to go for the Il-28R as they were the most versatile and colourful examples. Here is what I’m going to build: NH-3 in early 1970s markings with weathered Dayglo orange markings. There are few kits of Il-28 available in 1/72 scale and none of them is especially good or accurate. The old Airfix offering has nostalgic value but nothing more. Italeri’s kit is better but the wing is terrible; it is far too thick and shows an inverted gull wing effect. All Il-28s have a thin, straight wing with zero dihedral. Opening the big Chinese box immediately gives a promise of something better. Parts look very good with fine engraved surface detailing. The wing halves look thin but warped. With some careful work this should build into a great model. There is one sentence in the original air crew manual repeating over and over again: “Make ready and then proceed as follows”. I’m going to use that with this build report! This means that some "interesting" work lies ahead if I wish to build a Nikita with straight wings. But more of that later. Thanks to the type rating course I still have all the manuals and notebooks. I decided to check the kit measurements and details against that material and provide as much information to my fellow modellers as possible. I also paid a visit to the museum studying and photographing the real thing for two days. It soon became apparent that almost all the detailing is superficial and nothing is really spot on. The kit’s basic shape is very good but the location of the wing and bomb bay are clearly a cross between several Il-28 variants. All detailed information in this build is for the Il-28R. I may add occasional comments about the basic bomber when I am certain about the facts. I calculated the measurements using the data from the factory drawing above. It seems that the kit is pretty accurate indeed. The Il-28R differs mainly from the bomber by: · carrying jettisonable tip tanks and therefore different wing tips · having 168 mm (3,5 mm in 1/48 scale) longer engine gondolas, that are also wider · having larger main wheels with a diameter of 1260 mm (26,25 mm in 1/48 scale) · carrying a nose gun only on the port side · having a camera bay in the rear fuselage with doors for both oblique and vertical photography And then there is lots of smaller details differing from the bomber variant. I will show them for you as the story goes on. Pozaluista, samolet Il-28R. So, Ladies and Gentlemen: make ready and then proceed as follows. Navigator's compartment (Part 1) Let’s start from the navigator’s compartment. A few photos with explanations will help the modeller to orientate himself/herself in the glasshouse which represents the 1940s idea of ergonomics. The first goal is to re-shape the gun compartment on the port side. Kit provides a part that is too narrow. As I already had plastic strip and card at hand, I created the oxygen control panel and a rack for the bombing computer on top of the gun compartment as well. Next detail was the chart stowage at the side just below the plotting table. However something was wrong. The gun compartment should run all the way up to the rear bulkhead. The Radar Power Unit should then sit on top of that at the same level with the seat (as per instructions). This suggests that the gun compartment is too high in the first place. But if you remove plastic to correct it, the front end will be completely inaccurate. So I ended up cutting the scratch built gun compartment to it’s original length. Am I the “Master Modeller”? No, but slightly frustrated… All interior surfaces are painted with semi-gloss bright yellow. Different shades of paint are clearly used. I paint with Humbrol enamels and chose Hu 154 for the main colour and Hu 24, 81 and 99 for various details. All visible surfaces are painted with olive green. Humbrol 150 with a semi-gloss top coat is an almost perfect match. Walls and floor in crew compartments are covered with thick, dark green quilts with a satin sheen and clearly visible diamond shaped stich pattern (you’ve seen those also in aircraft like B-29s or A-4s). After some careful thinking I decided to create the pattern with MS Power Point and then by using the Snipping Tool cut “pieces” that I could easily scale down and print. These prints were then covered with self-adhesive soft plastic used for covering aeronautical charts. It took some time and patience to create templates out of plain paper but it was well worth the effort. Finally I attached these quilts in place using CA and two sided Scotch tape. And they look perfect to my eye! The navigator’s main instrument panel in Il-28R looks very different when compared to that of the bomber (and the kit). It is easiest to build one from the scratch and use instrument decals. All instruments came from a decal set by Airscale. All Il-28s are equipped with the Soviet built PSBN-M (Pribov Slepogo Bombometanija i Navigatshii-Modernizirovannyj) bombing and navigation radar. The Soviets didn’t provide much information about the radar system and its use but then the US embassy in Helsinki came to rescue. The Americans donated to the air force a set of B-29’s manuals and it became clear that the radar was “closely related” to the American AN/APQ-13 used in the Superfortress. The kit provides both the radar set and the RV-2/RV-10 Radar Altimeter control unit as one piece. They should be separated and RA set on a shelf just left of the instrument panel. At first few photos of the real thing for Super Detailers. I’m finally getting there! And pretty happy with the port side. More to come, so stay tuned and stay safe🙂 Cheers, Antti