большая оранжевая птица! Petlyakov Pe-8 Polar Aviation (Amodel 1/72) - where the heck did that deadline come from?!

[TonyOD]

большая оранжевая птица (bol'shaya oranzhevaya ptitsa) being Russian for "big orange bird"!

 

 

This is my pick for the Unarmed GB, the mighty Soviet Petlyakov PE-8 here in a striking orange “polar aviation” livery, as OOB from the Amodel 1/72 kit. 

 

The Pe-8 was developed by the Soviets in the 1930s. Four-engined heavy bombers in the vein of the B-17 or the Lancaster, both produced in their thousands, weren’t really their thing, and only 93 were ever built. Rather than the “strategic bombing” employed by the western allies, the Soviets went in for what could best be called “nuisance bombing” – raids involving a small number of aircraft on targets likely to generate maximum propaganda value, such as a raid on Berlin in 1941 which was blighted by losses to both enemy and friendly fire, mechanical failures (one Pe-8 crashed on takeoff, killing the entire crew) and aircraft running out of fuel. Famously a Pe-8 landed in Scotland while transporting Vyacheslav Molotov to Washington DC for talks with the Americans in May 1942.

 

I always like to get to know the aircraft I’m building if I can, but I spent some time googling things like “Petlyakov Pe-8 polar aviation” in vain, couldn’t even turn up a photograph. Then I had a brainwave and googled “Петляков Пе-8 полярная авиация” instead. Bingo! Tons of stuff in Russian, all of which could be accessed through the wonder of Google Translate.

 

And what a plane this turns out to be!

 

N-396 (“N” being the Roman alphabet equivalent of the Cyrillic “H”) had radial engines which made me assume, wrongly as it turned out, that this airframe was one of the very late Pe-8s produced in 1944 as transports (Pe-8 ON - Osobovo Naznacheniya, or Special Mission). Not so! When the Soviets set up their Polar Aviation division at the end of the 1940s many of the aviators they recruited to fly supply missions to their Arctic bases were veterans of the Great Patriotic War who had flown bombing missions in the Pe-8. It seems that these airmen had developed an attachment to the Pe-8, and they selected three out-of-service bombers that were lying around somewhere, stripped the armaments, had them retrofitted with more reliable radial engines (and in the case of N-396 distinctive four-bladed propellers) and given a lick of paint (orange for N-396), and off they went.

 

N-396 is notable in that it undertook the first non-stop flight from the North Pole to Moscow in 1949. This flight was supposed to make two stops en route but it seems a direct flight carrying barrels of spare fuel on board was attempted almost for a laugh on the spur of the moment.

 

The crew was led by Vasily Nikiforovich Zadkov, a hugely experienced polar pilot, and was accompanied by a dog called Signal, so named because at the polar bases he could hear the sound of an approaching aircraft long before his human companions could, and would bark excitedly (in much the same way as our dog Bella does with SWMBO’s Toyota Auris!)

 

The extraordinary story of the 17 hour, 27 minute flight is told in full in notes made by one of the crew members along the way, including how they carried a bucket of snow all the way from the North Pole to Moscow! Being Google Translate, the translation is a little clunky but even so it’s stirring and evocative stuff.

 

I'm looking forward to getting stuck into this one.

 

Cheers

Tony

Edited August 5, 2021 by TonyOD

[Brad]

Welcome along, this looks like it's gunna be awesome!

[TonyOD]

Here's the kit... and it's a big ole box of plastic alright. In fact I'm going straight from the smallest thing I've ever built to the largest. With a 54cm wingspan (where am I going to put it?!) I thought I would be a contender for largest build, surely any airliners will be 1/144 I thought, but @TonyW's already beaten me on that score with his Stratocruiser.

 

Box shot, nice painting of the plane in all its orangey glory (in the photo above she's wearing insulating covers over the engine cowls, truly it is a case of orange all over.) No I don't have abnormally small hands. The aircraft bears more tahn a passing resemblance to the B-17, which was developed at around the same time, but the model will be a full four inches wider in the wingspan than a Fortress.

 

 

Sprue shot 1

 

 

Sprue shot 2

 

 

Sprude shot 3!

 

 

The decals are few in number and large in size.

 

 

And this (I'm not even sure one will be enough)

 

 

At first look the kit is nicely moulded in terms of surface details (which appears to be a mix of recessed and, er, "layered", like the panels on the plane were overlaid), if quite rough around the edges. Being a short run kit there's none of yer fancy locator pins. I think I'm going to need to put a fair bit of work into it but I'm looking forward to grappling with the monster.

 

Cheers

Tony

 

 

 

[TonyW]

A whopper!

Also one I've never even heard of, so I'll be following along with interest.

The colour scheme is going to make for a very distinctive model indeed.

[ColonelKrypton]

I think this version of the PE-8 is an attractive aircraft with the radial engines and four bladed propellers.

 

Now what you need is a 1/72 Tupolev G-1 and G-2 in Polar livery to keep this one company.

 

cheers, Graham 

[TonyOD]

2 hours ago, GrahamCC said:

Now what you need is a 1/72 Tupolev G-1 and G-2 in Polar livery to keep this one company.

Oof, this could get pricey. The orange G-1 (Mikromir kit) would certainly make a striking companion piece. Though Humbrol might be scratching their heads at the spike in sales of gloss orange rattlecans in the Nottinghamshire area.

[dogsbody]

I have a Zvezda 1/72 Pe-8 bomber and that comes in a quite large box, too.

 

I'll definitely be following this build.

 

 

 

 

Chris

[TonyOD]

3 hours ago, dogsbody said:

I have a Zvezda 1/72 Pe-8 bomber

If (given the amount of see-through plastic involved) you feel inclined to get masks, I guarantee you will find them more easily than I did! 😉

[Adam Poultney]

This should be interesting

[RidgeRunner]

Oh yes, Tony, a great choice. What a great, brutal-looking machine the Pe-8 was :). Good luck!

 

Martin

 

 

[Ol' Scrapiron]

On 4/12/2021 at 3:10 AM, TonyOD said:

The aircraft bears more than a passing resemblance to the B-17...

 

That resemblance leaped out at me right away. I will have to do a bit more reading on this plane and share with some of my B-17 circle.

 

I certainly look forward to seeing your progress on this project.

[JeroenS]

I'm in. I like big stuff and I like the polar stuff as well. Good combo 🙂 

[TonyOD]

And we're off! Spent an hour with the kit this evening, nothing worth a picture yet but it's become clear that she's a fettlesome beast, it soon became apparent that pretty much every piece is going to need some degree of trimming or sanding. Should be fun. I am painting the props too... 4 props x 4 blades = 16 yellow tips to paint and mask. If you play with the heavies I guess... have fun everyone... 

[DaveyGair]

Should be a fun build, I have a couple of Amodel kits and Every build I've read about involves a lot of elbow grease!

Good luck, should look great when done.

 

Davey.

[TonyOD]

Workspace in its usual state of chaos, not much to look at apart from lots of bits of interior in at various stages of fettling, sticking and priming. I wish I’d discovered Tamiya Extra Thin a long time ago, it makes everything very easy!

 

Note tiny internal window that I’ve taken the trouble to fit and mask, I’ve since realised that thin will be invisible, as will all that detail behind it. I presume there’s an “armed” version of this kit with opening bomb doors where this would look impressive.

 

 

You got that right @DaveyGair, shake-and-bake this is not!

[TonyOD]

While I wait for various bits of interior to dry I’m setting about those mighty wings. Once fettled and sanded the dimensional fit of all the various pieces is pretty good, just that the plastic is so soft and the pieces so large that some warpage is inevitable. It’s a case of glue a bit, wait for it to bond, glue a bit more... there’s a separate inner wing panel top and bottom each side with so little styrene in play that I don’t trust the join to hold, so I’m strengthening it with some tabs superglued in. Other supermarket own brand olive based spreads are available.

 

[PattheCat]

I prefer apples but I'm OK with an orange, so I'll follow this.

Good luck with this mighty beastie.

 

[TonyOD]

Today I received this through the post all the way from the US of A... if you're building the Zvezda kit masks are easy enough to get hold of, if you want the Amodel on they're like the proverbial hen's teeth! I could find only two stockists who had it in, one in Europe who wanted to charge me 15 euros to post an envelope (yeah right), the other Sprue Brothers in the States who aren't shipping to the UK any more because they can't figure out the post-Brexit tax rules 🥴. This is where the International Britmodeller Brotherhood swings into action! I am hugely indebted to Mr Dennis "@Corsairfoxfouruncle" Brown of Romeoville, Illinois for helping me secure one of these. You're a legend, Dennis.

 

[Corsairfoxfouruncle]

Always Happy to help Tony. Happy to see they arrived intact. 

Edited April 20, 2021 by Corsairfoxfouruncle

[TonyOD]

Bit of preliminary work on the fuselage while the wings are coming together. Even the most cursory test fitting tells me it’s a “crammer”, the interior bits just won’t quite fit inside the fuselage. Another build I’ve seen of this kit suggests adding a plastic strip along the fuselage join to space it out (or sand down the interior parts to fit), but apart from being a load of hassle on a fuselage so large there’s the risk of throwing out the fit on the nose section and canopy. I think the issue is the rather heavy-handed interior detail getting in the way, there are “channels” for the edges of the cockpit and cabin floors to sit in  but these are barely wide  enough to accommodate them; I might get it glued into one half but getting the other fuselage half on would be tricky. So the easiest solution seems to be to cut and dremel some of this stuff out of the way.

 

Edited April 22, 2021 by TonyOD

[PattheCat]

Ouch! It looks like a handful right from the start. But I'm sure you'll tame the beast.

Cheers.

Pat.

[Brad]

Good solution, always beats trying to fill and sand!

[DaveyGair]

Gooood! A proper 'modellers' kit! (Of which I'm not of course!).

 

Great stuff so far. I'm aiming to get a Zvezda Pe8 after I see what their Pe2 goes together like. I did their 1/35th Panther and that went really well.

 

Davey.

 

 

[Corsairfoxfouruncle]

12 hours ago, TonyOD said:

So the easiest solution seems to be to cut and dremel some of this stuff out of the way.

No sense in keeping it anyway, I seriously doubt most of it will be visible when this is all buttoned up. 

[JOCKNEY]

Really enjoying seeing this build coming to life, and well done Dennis on your contribution 

 

Cheers Pat