Late 1944 somewhere in the Eastern German borderland. A hot shot* Soviet P-39 pilot is showing off his airfield to a female officer on a Kettenkrad that he found abadoned at this former Luftwaffe air field - when he sees one of the new La-7 models parked up and just has to take a look inside and shows off this marvel of technology to his date.
(* self declared)
This build was part of my 12 Builds of Christmas project - this started as a desire to take a break from a number of very complicated builds that were clogging up my bench and sapping the mojo, instead to focus on 12 straight forward builds on straight forward vignette bases - using a production line technique for efficiency.
I started on the 12th December with the original plan to complete all the builds by the 22nd January IPMS Bolton show. As it was, the project took a lot longer, as one might expect. Instead I ended up splitting the project in half and completing the first six during February of which this was one.
The kit is one of the November 2022 release sets from Mark 1 models, made from moulds developed by Stransky. Although a new release it has the feel of a much older production with lots of flash, ambiguous instructions and poor fitting. Even the plastic feels very different, far more brittle and fragile than most kits and small parts in particular were a chore to work with.
Not unbuildable and with a decent cockpit but needs a fair amount of fettling for sure.
Fortunately putty came to the rescue.
The landing gear at least went together with out too much problem.
This was definitely one of the sort of builds that this project was really helpful with - I committed that all of the projects would move along together so I couldn't just abandon a build or leave it on the shelf of shame.
Fortunately the high quality Sweet FM-2 I was making up simultaneously provided a good impulse and after a family Christmas dinner, supported by some whisky, I finally got the main pieces together so it could join the dozen ready to move onto the paint stage.
The one joy with the kit, although it still required a lot of work to extract from a giant sprue gate and flash, was that a moulded, slid canopy is provided - possibly the first ever made in this scale and superb addition to the model.
The paint scheme is taken from the kit profile, I used the AK Interactive 3rd Gen set of AMT colours. I can't testify to their precise accuracy but they look roughly correct.
Fortunately the Mark 1 decals live up to their usual high standard and were nice and thin and easy to apply. I did later weather the aircraft slightly with some metallic paint and an AK weathering pencil.
All twelve of the aircraft are to be based on my new standard base type - 10x10cm canvas boards with masked edges to provide a white border. All of my models are intended to be shown on model show displays, so having a distinctive base makes for a nice consistency and good visibility, it also makes them much more convenient for transporting.
For the Kettenkrad I used the Armory Models resin kit. This is a beautifully detailed and easy to assemble model with nice delicately thin parts - the only downside is that it wasn't possible to get a driver figure in, as was my original plan for the diorama - so the mechanic ended up walking seperately.
I decided it would be fun to weather up the Kettenkrad - the vehicle had been left behind by the retreating German forces, perhaps it had even broken down before being fixed with careful application of a Soviet sledgehammer.
While looking for some figures for other scenes I found these two rather nice figures in a Presier set. Unpainted model railway figures, they are in 1/160 which makes them slightly small, but when not mixed with larger resin or whitemetal figures, they don't look out of scale and their detail makes them a good addition to the scene. I like my figures to be directly interacting with the scene and not just posing, so these were perfect for allowing a the pilot to be peering into the cockpit and offering his date a hand up onto the wing.
Based on some photos of German airfields during the war, the base was painted with soil and concrete texture paint with static grass applied over the soil.
The final stage was the wiring - the La-7 having a slightly awkward double wire aerial arrangement that took a while to perfect. I use 0.07mm wire for the rigging, it has more visibility than thread which is good for model show display, although it lacks the flex of Uschi thread so careful handling is required.
Thank you for reading all this way, enjoy the final photos
