by Peter Hall
1/350 Admiral Kuznetsov (Trumpeter)
Hereby a series of photos of the Trumpeter 1/350 Admiral Kuznetsov, having just taken nearly a year to get it built. There were one or two inaccuracies in the kit that I had to put right.
The first being the area of superstructure underneath the Island. I had to extend the whole thing forward so that it came level with the front of the Island above it. This I scratchbuilt using 40 thou plastic card. The AK 630 sponson was also enlarged and re-positioned on the starboard side.
The other major work was the removal and rebuild of the port side flight deck catwalks/ liferaft stowages. These are moulded horizontal in the kit, but the outer three quarters of the sections that house the liferaft racks are actually angled downwards. Again I did this modification using 40thou plasticard.
I had a real problem with decals on this project. The first being with the ships names.
The photographs I have of the ship show these names clearly painted in yellow, but the kit decals for these are a browny gold and they go darker still when applied on to the Russian Northern Fleet Grey paint scheme. So I ended up making my own decals for these names using white ink jet decal paper to give the yellow a good backing. It was a bit of trial and error at first but eventually I got it to my satsfaction.
The next area of the kit where decals are used is the flight Deck. The ones in the kit are too bright and the colours were not quite right to my eyes. I got to work and painted all the deck markings by hand except the helicopter operating circles.
The aircraft decals are the Sprint Scale Airwing decals, and these make all the difference as Trumpeter seemed to not know what to offer here.
The Photo Etched details are the WEM PE sets for the Ship and the Air Wing and also the Deck Vehicles. The figures are the lovely resin offerings from L'Arsenal. These are a dream to use and as you can see I have even managed to add helmets to the Aircrew figures.
I used WEM Colour Coats Russian Northern Fleet Grey and Deck Red, but the Flight deck colour eluded me for a while. I ended up using Humbrol 165 for the lighter grey areas and Humbrol 79 for the Landing Strip.
The only thing missing now is the Trumpeter SU25 Frogfoot attack aircraft, which are shortly to be released hopefully.
