¹⁄32

Polikarpov I-153 Chaika

I-153 “Czajka”
Producer: SilverWings
Scale: 1/32

What's inside the box?

The SilverWings kit presents outstanding quality. Resin parts are casted without any flashes. A nice addition is a photo-etched fret with the tiny details. I can easily say it presents equal quality as the similar Tamiya or Hasegawa products. When you consider that every part of the mother-kit was hand-maden, without computers and modern cyber-technology, you can only say “chapeau bas” to the designers.

Building and painting

After studying the assembly instruction I knew I will have a lot of work. All of this because a large quantity of parts and details which needs to be put together somehow. Photos from the building process attached to this article shows the particle steps and sub-assemblies. Some of you may catch few weird details – for example the vertical stabilizer is slightly distorted to one side and asymmetrical. This is done on purpose, as it can be seen on the real planes. This effect compensates a torque generated by the running spinner. Another interesting hint – the stripe on the wheel tires. This can also be seen on archive photos of the real planes. It was some kind of additional reinforcement of the tire.

After some cosmetic corrections the model was covered with the Gunze Surfacer as a primer. Producer offers two painting options: Soviet and Finnish. Of course I have decided to make the Finn. First colour sprayed on my Chaika was yellow, in a typical shade for Finnish Air Force. The colour is FS13655. The only appropriate paint I had was unfortunately the Model Master gloss enamel ”Blue Angels Yellow” (No.2023). I say “unfortunately” because I lost the habit of using enamels, especially gloss, which stinks more than acrylics and have much longer time of drying. Other colours were also chosen according to FS numbers. This way for green I took the Model Master 1715 (FS 31151), often used for interiors of US planes. Another one was blue Model Master 2033 (FS35414).

So, as you see the building process was very straightforward. Although there's a lot of parts, including very tiny ones, there was no problem with their assembling. This is another great quality release from the SilverWings company.

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