AvantGarde Model Kits (AMK) 1/48 Aero L-29 Delfin
By Morgan Girling
About the Subject
The L-29 Delphin (Dolphin) was Czechoslovakia's first indigenous jet aircraft, and was designed and produced by Aero Vodochody. It became the standard jet trainer for the Warsaw Pact countries in the 1960s, with 3,600 examples built. This simple, rugged aircraft has been flown by 27 countries well into this century, often being replaced by the more svelte L-39 Albatros. Several are now in private hands, flying the airship circuit or offering combat flying instruction to all of us Walter Mitty types.
The Kit
Your intrepid editor thrust this kit into my hands with the stern command "review it!" As he rode off into the foggy night, my protestations of "not my scale" and "not my subject" fell on deaf ears .
I'm glad they did.
Opening the box, one is struck by the production values and presentation, which were like the high-end gift boxes of moon cakes one finds in Asian markets. Inside is a nicely produced 12-page instruction booklet captured between two end bands. Once that is pried free of the box, the topmost of the mylar parts bags holds the clearest, most optically perfect canopy I've ever seen on a model. The word that popped into my head was "exquisite."
That word was oft-repeated as I dug down through the other bags of parts. The recessed panel lines and "anti-rivets" are deep enough that they won't be obliterated by paint, but not so deep that they will leave memories of Matchbox at the pin-wash stage. The jet exhaust is a separate one-piece insert with a delicately fine trailing edge.
The wings are split horizontally and have separate parts to line the intake trunks, complete with guide vanes. The flaps can be built up or down. If building deployed, one must add in 20 photo-etched rib ends before buttoning up the wing, which should give a very nice scale effect. All the landing gear bays are fully detailed. The nose bay consists of a bulkhead and a horizontal panel separating the nose gear bay from the equipment bay above. Both sides of the bulkhead are detailed and one can build the model with the nose access panel open if desired.
The cockpit assembly looks very straightforward with each seat consisting left and right halves. This has been criticized in Italeri's 1/72 F-5 as leaving an unfillable seam, but the separate cushions and seat pan conveniently hide them here. In these days of sandwiched photoetch + transparency instrument panels, the kit panels are a bit of a throwback, consisting each of a one-piece plastic part with a decal for the instruments. In an acknowledgement that not all of us are perfect modelers, they provide spare decals for each instrument panel. The cockpit tub, control sticks and glare shield are pretty standard.
One nice touch that I rarely see is the molded detail of the quilted padding on the cockpit sides. The canopies can be assembled open or closed - the canopy quality is good enough that you don't have to leave them open to show the cockpit detail. On the other hand, with the front canopy hinged on the side and the rear canopy sliding aft, the open combination should look interesting in its own right.
The rest of the assembly instructions are de riggeur.
The only error I see in the instructions is that the illustration in step 4 would have you install the front of the engine backwards. Similarly, the only nit I have is with the full-color paint guide. AMK goes to great lengths to accurately render the colors, call out their names and the paint numbers. Unfortunately, they don't tell you whose paint numbers they are, so you're left matching color chips in the hobby shop. In spite of this oversight, the painting guides for the different marking schemes call out the colors as "silver", "aircraft grey" and an assortment of FS colors, so all is not lost.
AMK provides decals for seven different schemes: 3 silver (Soviet, Czechoslovakian and Iraqi air forces), 2 grey (Czech Republic and Indonesia) and 2 grey+green (East Germany and Slovak Republic). It is a shame they didn't offer at least one of the colorful schemes used by aerobatic teams, as the selection leaves one with a somewhat dowdy looking aircraft dressed in dowdy paint.
Conclusion
All in all, I think this is an excellent offering of this under-represented subject, which should be a breeze to build and obtain a very nice finished result. My thanks to Dragon Models USA for the review copy.