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Miniwing 1/144 Avia B.35

By Dave Flitton

For the inbox review, please refer to Matt Bittner's First Look.

History (via Wikipedia):

The Avia B.35 ( RLM designation Av-35) was a fighter aircraft built in Czhekoslovakia shortly before World War II. It was designed to meet a 1935 requirement by the Czekoslovakian Air Force for a replacement for their B.534 fighter biplanes. The B.35 was an elegant, low-wing monoplane with an elliptical wing. The fuselage was constructed from welded steel tube, covered in metal ahead of the cockpit and fabric aft, while the wing was of entirely wooden construction. Rather anachronistically, the Air Force specified a fixed tailwheel undercarriage for the aircraft, in the hope that this would speed development, as the mechanism for retracting the undercarriage was simply not yet available.

The Build

Normally you would start building aircraft with the cockpit. Not in this instance, since the cockpit is just a preformed hole in the fuselage, this was quite nice.  I didn't have to worry about losing pieces or mis-matching the fuselage.  I could just add everything after it was painted.  So the first thing I had to worry about was the fuselage, and this is where I immediately saw a problem, the radiator scoop.

The radiator scoop looked more like a round Typhoon inlet rather than the squared inlet of the B.35.  I had to widen the horizontal width and square off the bottom and top of the "chin" to make it look right.  I also added two ports above the "chin" as this was missing.  I also added a metal screen on the inside as this looked wierd without something to fill

in the hole.  By fixing the radiator the spinner was now too large and would not fit correctly.  I had to grind this down to the proper proportions, and then promptly lost it.  The carpet monster can be quite unforgiving with small pieces.  Then, just before doing this review I lost the prop and spinner again (I made the mistake of allowing the prop to freely spin), so I had fashioned another spinner but this time the spinner is too small! So, when viewing my spinner, just avert your eyes.

Everything else with the build went fine, just make sure you have some good eyes or an optivisor to carve the rest of the pieces off the resin plugs.  I had to add little metal pins to the spatted landing gear so that I wouldn't keep knocking them off. Unfortunately, I didn't add one to the radio mast as this was long gone before I could paint.  Eventually, I will build an new mast and a spinner to complete this thing.

Painting

Unless you have an awesome airbrush, the patience of Job, and a steady hand, you will have to revert to anything that will work.  As you can see from my pictures, I started with an airbrush, but at this scale, even tiny dots of paint look like Luftwaffe mottle camouflage.  I had to paint over this with a brush, which leaves streaks, and frustration. Then comes the decals.

The decals are rather poor.  They are extremely grainy, like they were printed using the draft setting instead of high quality mode, and they tended to not adhere to the painted surface very well. I had to add Future floor wax as my decal medium as the decal would melt too fast using a standard softener and the ink would disappear as well.

Conclusions

All in all, this was a pleasant build, except for the chin scoop and spinner, and decals and poor eyes and the need for surgical forceps to handle the parts.  If you are in to 1/144 scale modeling, this is a pleasant challenge.

Thanks to Internet Modeler and Miniwing for the review sample.