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
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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:
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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.
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. |
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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.
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Assembling re quired
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 tes t
fitting had to be performed before gluing the parts.
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And when the fuselage and
the circular wing are final ly 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 ?
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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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