Tamiya MiG-15 Review

Tamiya's MiG-15

Tamiya, 1/48

Tamiyas Mig-15 has been out for a few years now and is one of a string of early cold war jets that they have released lately – others including the F-84 Thunderjet and Douglas Skyray - a real bonus to fans of cold war jets like myself.

The kit is typical Tamiya with finely engraved panel lines throughout, though I must confess that I found the cockpit a bit spartan – it would certainly benefit from some resin or etched brass aftermarket goodies, or scratchbuilding if you’re up to it (i.e. unlike me!). The seat features decals for seat belts, a feature of Tamiya kits and one that annoys the life out of me as it just doesn’t look realistic enough in my opinion – even more so as fine quality detail is such a hallmark of Tamiya kits. Because of the whole seat belt thing, I chose to have my model featuring the pilot figure supplied. The figure is OK, but nothing special and so I didn’t go to town on his painting as I would have done with a better quality pilot figure. My original plan was to feature the canopy open (the canopy is on a sliding rail and can be posed open or closed) with the airbrakes open, depicting a plane that has just landed, but plans change! (more on this later).

Another regular feature of Tamiya kits is a nose weight. This is something that I love about Tamiya kits, especially one like the Mig-15 where space to put sufficient weight to prevent tail sitting is limited. The metal slug fits nicely into the lower cockpit/forward wheel well assembly and is a lovely and well thought out convenience IMO.

The entire rear fuselage can be removed to display the jet engine included in the kit, a trolly is also included for the rear fuselage to sit on. This is a Tamiya feature I’m not so keen on. The engine is well detailed, as far as IM plastic goes, but looks poor in comparison to the detail that can be achieved with resin. Aries manufacture a Mig-15 engine to replace the Tamiya rendition and it looks truly spectacular in comparison. At the very least, the plastic Tamiya engine would need a lot of scratch built detail to make it look acceptable. Added to this is the fact that the jet pipe is split in 2 vertically with the resultant seam running perpendicular to a lot of raised rib detail – removing this seam without removing the ribbing would be no mean feat! Finally, if you choose not to display the engine and close the fuselage up, there is a big, ugly step where the front and rear fuselage join which took a lot of work on my kit to sand and scrape down to an acceptable level. Can you tell I don’t like this whole display the engine thing?

Construction of the rest of the kit is simple and the main construction went swimmingly from there on. But then my kit stalled for a while. In fact it was in real danger of joining the other half dozen kits in the partially complete pile. It wasn’t that I was bored with the kit, just other things took my interest and by the time I came back to modeling, the Mig was in real danger of being dropped. It was only my desire to finish a kit and actually start reducing my stash (a promise I made myself sometime ago) that forced me to take the model through to completion. But now I was in a bit of a rush to finish it so I could start on other projects. So time saving decisions were made – anything that complicated and/or prolonged the building of the kit was dropped. So no drop tanks, no complicated colour scheme, no air brakes open and (momentously) no gear down. The last was a somewhat fateful decision as it probably increased the time the kit took…

The problem is that most models today are designed to be displayed with the gear down, thus not too much effort is put into making sure the gear doors fit the wheel wells – which is the exact problem I had. A little trimming round the edges helped, but the real culprit was the internal spars and ribs in the wheel wells that were preventing a good fit. Much scraping and gouging (and discussion on the forums) later and I had forced those doors into place. Phew!

Onto the painting. Another of my bugbears with Tamiya kits is their complete lack of effort in the colour scheme department. Their kits of US aircraft tend to be the worst offenders with only US options (foreign users are ignored). Often there is also little variety in the colour schemes offered, many being boring variations on a theme (their 1/32 F-4D is the worst, offering 3 similar Vietnam era schemes, ignoring a host of possible other options). Not so with this Mig-15, which bizarrely, considering how drab and uniform communist aircraft tend to be, has several colourful options. Chinese, Russian, and North Korean options are on offer featuring exotically camouflaged or a bright red/NMF Chinese bird. The Russian option has a big red lightning bolts adorning it. But I chose the plain North Korean option!

A coat of Halfords grey primer, a touch of filling and sanding here and there and then it was a coat of Halfords Aluminium which went on smooth as ever. I made a couple of mistakes with my NMF though. Firstly I masked over the Aluminium too quickly with the result that bits of it aren’t as shiny as the rest. Secondly I used too dark a shade for the contrasting panels – Ford Nimbus Grey being better suited for jet pipes and the like. This was my first go at different panel shades so I’m not too concerned and it didn’t look to bad by the time I’d put the decals on. Oh, and a 3rd mistake. I didn’t do enough panels in the darker shade, and the ones I did are too "uniform". I just chose the easiest ones, hehe.

The decals are typical Tamiya, thick and glossy. They went on nice and smooth with a brush of Johnson’s Klear to bed them down.

Overall, I’m pretty pleased with the kit. Apparently there is some controversy over the shape of the fuselage, but the only other kit in this scale (that I know of) is the Monogram offering which is out of scale so…JMNs be damned! It looks like a Mig to me! The fit was good apart from that fuselage step and the cockpit detail could be better but other than that it’s a fine kit.

My biggest problem is with the whole engine thing. Putting in little "extras" like that seems to be a feature of a lot of Tamiya kits these days. Perhaps the biggest culprit is their 1/32 Zero which features a host of gimmicks such as retractable undercarriage which have inflated the price to around £70. Compare this to the recent Hasegawa offerings of the Me-109 in 1/32 which feature none of these daft ideas and just concentrate on a good kit with adequate detail and retail for less than £30. Doesn’t take a genius to figure out who’s going to sell more kits. One wonders how many more Mig-15s Tamiya would sell if the price was 3 or 4 quid less without a displayable engine…?

Nevertheless the Mig-15 is a hugely important aircraft in the history of aviation and badly under-represented by the kit makers. So now the real question – Mig-15 what ifs!

The Mig-15 was built in such vast numbers and used by sooooooo many communist bloc countries that a simple what-if with just a change of national markings is nearly impossible. One option is a carrier based version, as discussed on the message boards - though I wouldn’t want to be the pilot landing a 1st generation swept wing jet fighter on a carrier deck! Or perhaps Kurt Tank escaped to the west and designed a jet fighter based on his Ta-183 for the British or Americans. Or maybe the Russians got their mits on Japan at the end of the war and Communist Japan operated the Mig-15….

Got any ideas for a what-if Mig-15? Then come on over to the forum and lets get discussing ‘em!

Page created November 9, 2003