Assault Ekranoplan

By Stuart Beatson

This is Revell's 1/144th scale Ekranoplan which was released a couple of years ago. As a reference I bought the Red Star series book on Ekranoplans and found this an excellent resource. The book had many intriguing designs, which set my imagination in motion. I decided that I would come up with my own Assault Ekranoplan design.

The Assault Ekranoplan that I came up with required two kits to make. One of the kits was assembled normally while one was cut up so that just the top portion of the fuselage from the turret to the tail plane was left.

The model was assembled as per the instructions. The fit of the nose intake assembly left much to be desired. This required a lot of filling and sanding to get a halfway decent fit. Part of my design called for two rotating ball mounted turrets on the side of the Ekranoplan. The turrets came from the spares box and were fashioned from the end caps of drop tanks from a 1/48 Rafale kit I had lying around. . Prior to the assembly of the main fuselage two holes were drilled and the turrets installed and faired in with putty. Once this was done the fuselage was glued together.

The additional fuselage from the second cut up kit was glued on top of the assembled fuselage and the gaps filled with "Knead It" which is a to part epoxy putty which is kneaded together like dough. This stuff sets rock hard and can be sanded and shaped easily.

The wings, tip floats and tail planes were then glued on. The fit here was also very poor and lots of filling and sanding was required. Several coats of spray primer filler allowed me to find and correct any gaps, which had not been filled to my satisfaction. It also took care of the rather rough finish to the surface of this kit.

I used a circle template to scribe the missile hatches. At this point, god knows why, I decided that I wanted to have one of the hatches open. I drilled a hole, the same diameter as the scribed circle and inserted a tube of aluminium to simulate the launch tube. The missile was made a piece of shaped plastic rod. The open hatch was two pieces of plastic punched out using a gasket punch set that I have.

Once every thing had been completed it was of to the paint shop for an all over coat of dark grey. I decided to highlight the model by using light grey, which was lightly sprayed on the upper surfaces to give it a sun bleached look. I then painted the missile and launch tube white. And thus it was done.

Top