A really RUSSIAN Russian! The "Hobby" Yak-7

[Greg in OK]

I had mentioned in the Chat for "From Russia With Love GB" that on first glance I misread the rules.

 

What I thought was that kit had to me made in Russia, no Hasegawa MiG-21's, for instance, but good old, some times crude, RUSSIAN made kits, those where want we wanted.

 

A couple of days later I reread the post and figured out that I had made a big whoops.  (my mistake.)

 

However, I got a little stubborn about it and decided to do it both my way and the way the rules were actually written.

 

So I combed through my stash and found a surprising amount of models that actually fit both criteria. (some of them VERY nice and not crude in any way)

 

I picked the "Hobby" Yak-7 1/72 scale kit.  According to Scale Mates "Hobby" is the name of the manufacturer, kitting the kits sometime in the 80's.

 

 

About a decade later the kit was released again by another company and somehow both kits had ended up in my stash.

 

 

One is molded in thick green plastic, the other in thick gray plastic and both have REALLY bad canopies but both molds have the all important mark.

 

 

So when the starting gun goes off, I will begin building a real RUSSIAN Russian!

 

Greg in OK

Edited April 22, 2017 by Greg in OK

[Basilisk]

Glad to see that you got it both ways Greg, but it looks to me that these kits are past there used by date - so be careful. On the other hand, it is always good to see Yakovlev piston fighters being build.

 

Cheers, Peter

[Grandboof]

A real challenge Good luck 

Martin H

[stevej60]

Good on ya  Greg,great to see someone taking on a real challenge look forward to this one.

[Greg in OK]

Хороший день, товарищи! (Good day, Comrades!)

 

I wanted to get a good start on this kit so prior to today I started sanding and scraping and cutting the HUGE amount of flash on the "Hobby" kit.  (Yes, my Russian is limited to on-line translators but as far as I can tell the company name is 'Hobby'.) 

 

Trimming the flash was a time consuming job (several evenings) but not one drop of adhesive touched the parts until the starting bell today.  The kit reminds me of my (unsuccessful) attempt to make a vac-form model.  SLIGHTLY less cutting, scraping and sanding than that effort, but not a whole lot less.

 

Once the flash is removed it seems to be a fairly nice kit, at least in terms of shape if not fit.

 

So this morning I jumped in with the glue a started putting it together.

 

 

I can see that I am going to have to do quite a bit of fitting on this one.

 

Greg in Oklahoma

[TonyTiger66]

Crikey Greg; I didn't think anyone else had these anymore !

 

I tried to build the Yak 7 Uti version around 15 years ago. I know what you mean about flash ! Mine was in brittle, brown plastic. I think it took 3 days to get the flash off!

 

Then I just couldn't get the wings to align to the fuselage properly. Plus I sanded too much off of a wingtip trying to get it to look 'right', so it ended there, in tears .

 

It would be great to see someone succeed with the kit; the shapes seem right, I'm sure the potential is there.

 

All best regards 

TonyT

[Graham Boak]

They also did a Yak 9, mainly with the same parts.  I did end up assembling something approximating a Yak 7V from the pair, using a Falcon 7UTI canopy and undercarriage from spares.  I don't think I'd show it to anyone.  Recently I was rather surprised to find that I still had the remaining bits, and began wondering about making something from them, but that way madness lies.