Actually I love the LaGG-3. I think it was an innovative answer to a very serious question: How do you mass produce a modern fighter when your country has a serious shortage of a key material (Aluminum)? The answer the design team came up with was to use a strong innovative plastic impregnated wood for structural parts of the airframe (wing spars, etc...) and cover most of the aircraft with thin plywood that was doped and smoothed. An elegant answer that used the abundance to wood (think Siberian forest) available to the Soviet Union and reduced the demand for Aluminum.
That being said the LaGG-3 was in many ways a hard luck ship. Rushed into production before many of the problems with the aircraft had been worked out led to a disorganized production program (not helped at all by the German invasion of the Soviet Union and the need to relocate factories) full of constant revisions of production plans. Eventually, the LaGG-3's problems were solved and the aircraft transformed into the excellent La-5 and La-7.
Sadly my efforts to build this LaGG-3 model have mirrored the production difficulties of its' real life predecessor. But I refuse to give in and quit. I am not going to add aileron detail. My efforts looked amateurish and I was totally dissatisfied with them. So I'll save that for another project. Now I'm going to smooth those over and get back on track finishing this great piece of Russian aviation history.
In other news, I did some touch up painting and sprayed the P-40 with a gloss coat in preparation for applying decals.
Also worked on my Airfix USAAF figures and the bomb cart and bomb. Checking the dimensions of the bomb and converting them with a scale converter it measures closest to an AN/M-64 500 pound GP bomb.
I found an excellent reference on WW2 US aircraft bombs, TM 9-1980 Bombs for Aircraft (1944) here:
http://www.lexpev.nl/manuals/unitedstates.html
No comments:
Post a Comment