SNECMA C450 Coléoptère MIKU

by Angus on Aug 8 2003

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The aircraft

Or maybe should we say the Identified Flying Object: IFO ?

This is clearly what we can call a non conventional aircraft, but it is true that the 50's have seen in France several strange aircraft:  SO 9000 Trident,  Leduc family, Nord 14500 Griffon, Baroudeur, some are coming to be released by FM this year, don't miss them !

The most strange is naturely the SNECMA C450 Coléoptère, and it's ancestor the C400 P1 "ATAR volant".

Photo bellow shows the C400 at Le Bourget air show, 1957

 

 

The Coleoptere was equiped with a 3700 kgp ATAR E-5-V and was supposed to reach a 800km/h max speed.

On July the 25th,  1959 (and not 1955 as Miku declares it), Auguste Morel during the third free flight and the first test for a transitonal horizontal flight lost the control and ejected with no injury at 15 meters from the ground. This was the end of this ambitious project.

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There is little documentation on this aircraft.

This is the MIKY  ref 48 005 kit. I found it by chance at my reseller. It is clearly a non industrial kit, I knew it as my reseller did open the box for me, but this is the price to pay for such an original subject.

 

The kit is furnished in a small cardboard box:

 

 

The instructions are simply hand drawn:

The decal sheet is minimal, but there was no decoration on the real aircraft:

The kit is made of resin parts (reinforced with inside a small metal rod) and vacuformed transparent parts.

Vacuformed is not a material I do appreciate, if it offers a good transparency, you must be careful when you cut it and gluing it is always a problem.  Resin parts are far away from perfect, the engraving is too large and not regular, nothing is straight or circular as you can see it on this picture.

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Assembling the kit

It is clear that my goal was not to make an hyper detailed kit, but simply obtain with this base something as clean as possible and original.

 

So I started with the cockpit that does not look really realistic, but without any documentation I just realized quickly seat belts, and that's it. Cockpit is black, seat grey.

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If the front of the engine is not fantastic, the rear part is terrific. The blades are flat, not all with the same size, there are bubbles in the resin, and it is definitely not circular.

I just kept the base and installed on it a pipe of the same diameter (it seems I should have taken bigger), and added a cone to make something more realistic.

All this is glued inside without any other consideration.

 

 

It's time now to assemble the fuselage and the circular wing. As the engraving is not fantastic, with in particular rivets that look like relief pins (it should represent 2 cm rivets on the real aircraft), I did polish all this.

 

 

Assembling required a lot of putty.

notice also how the trailing edge is not regular.

 

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All trailing edges have to be more thin and a lot of test fitting had to be performed before gluing the parts.

 

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And when the fuselage and the circular wing are finally mounted, you discover that they don't fit together. You will have to suppress more than 1 mm on each inside wing.

Fuselage and wing done, they are left aside to be painted separately.

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It's time to care about transparent parts. You have to take your time to cut them precisely. Then I glue them with white glue for wood, the advantage is that it fills the small gaps, becomes quite transparent and nearly disappears. Meanwhile I have reused mastic in our case.

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Lateral and bottom transparent parts have been reinforced with aluminium paper, which also facilitates the usage of Maskol. Canopy has simply been hand painted in black as it's shapes are curved.

Painting

To make something more fun (prototype was full natural metal), I have realized a fantasy paint scheme of an operational Coleoptere. After all, you can find plastic models of the Luftwaffe in 1946, so why not ?

This is clearly impossible as this prototype had no weapon and very little petrol onboard.

As this kind of aircraft would have been particularly appropriate in the navy, I chose to put it in duty in the "Flotille 14F (Corsaires)" in the Aéronavale (French Navy). But I did not follow completely this idea by making a paint scheme similar to those applied to the Mirage III C at their beginning (French Air Force, not Aeronavale anymore), it is to say natural metal with red markings on the air intake.

So 1st hand painting of the air intake with red Humbrol 174.  Then I airbrushed acrylic Tamiya X11 Chrome Silver, a little bit of polish to correct the main flaws, then Chrome silver color again, followed by the application of diluted Humbrol 99, 91 and 11 on some panels.

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That's it, the result is far away from a show model (let's be humble), but considering the starting point, I am quite satisfied to have this original machine in my collection.

Angus

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Photos and text © by Laurent 'Angus' Beauvais