1/32 AERO L159A ALCA

Gallery Article by Jaroslav Hajecek on Dec 31 2003

 

Hallo all of you again. This is a 1/32 scale Aero L159A "ALCA". This aircraft is manufactured by Aero Vodochody in the Czech Republic. It is a Advanced Light Combat Aircraft, that is where the ALCA comes from. It is used as light attack aircraft by the Czech Air Force. It is a direct descendant of the world-wide famous L-39 Albatros Aircraft family. Since I do work for Aero, I figured it is a must, to have a model of this airplane.

 

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Since there are no L159 models available (at least to my knowledge), I contacted our marketing department and asked them where they get their models from and then contacted the guy that makes them, and asked him if he is willing to sell me some "raw material" of the L159, that I will make it myself. I received a basic fiberglass fuselage casting with nicely recessed panel lines (quite unusual for display models to my opinion) and some resin parts consisting of pylons, air intakes, seat instrument panels and decals.

When I told my colleagues that I have the model available they asked me if I will build them one, because they saw pictures of some of my models. Well, what would you expect, I did say yes. (I guess I am a nice guy :-)))) or crazy. One or the other or both.)

So, I was building 4 models at one time. To tell you the truth, this "serial production" is not my favorite thing to do. I do not want to do it again. I guess you all know the feeling when you are working on something like filling and sanding and polishing and it is not a shake and bake and you do a lot of it, so once you are finished with it you feel happy ? Well the worst thing for me I was, when I got finished with one I raised my head and there were at least 3 other ones  sitting there.  :-)) Well managed to get through that and can tell you all that my King Canada (Dremmel look-alike tool) was put to extensive use through this project. The construction was started with sanding the fiberglass body, than adding air intakes (lots of filling there, on one aircraft I even had two right hand ones:-(( ) The instrument panels and side consoles are a decal, the seat is resin casting and I did make the belts from masking tape and wire buckles and wire ejection handles.

The model was painted with AGAMA acrylic paints. It was a fun project after all and I am quite happy with the results. Please feel free to give me any feed-back. You are welcome to contact me at:  hajecekj@volny.cz

Happy modelling everyone !!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Jaroslav Hajecek

      

Photos and text © by Jaroslav Hajecek