DONE @p. 2: 1:72 Saab P29G ("Kurviga Tunnan") supersonic research aircraft

Dizzyfugu · July 22, 2019, 11:35:31 PM

It's early, but this will be another entry into the GB - and a plan I had on the agenda for some time. It's basically a Tunnan with two axial engines, but with some other mods to make it suitable for supersonic flight, e. g. different wings and an air intake with a sharp lip. Basis will be the Matchbox Saab 29, with lots of donor parts and some serious PSR on the fuselage.

Tophe · July 24, 2019, 03:53:35 AM

Interesting;..

Dizzyfugu · July 24, 2019, 11:45:22 PM

Work has already started while the "Bastang II" is till waiting for pics - it is currently just too hot for photo sessions... The engines will be an aftermarket resin part for a Hasegawa B-47, for the inner twin engine pod. It fits well into the profile, but it is a little wider than expected, so that the Tunnan will receive some pronouned hips.

Hence it will receive the nickname "Kurviga Tunnan". It really got curves now!

The air intake will also be changed with an F-100 part, and there will be new wings with a higher sweep angle, I currently favor parts from a PM Model Ta 183. Sounds weird, but shape and size look good so far.

kitbasher · July 25, 2019, 12:26:18 AM

Good luck, Dizzy. I'm still plodding on with https://www.whatifmodellers.com/index.php?topic=43302.msg756073#msg756073

Dizzyfugu · July 25, 2019, 05:04:52 AM

That looks sexy! My Tunnan will probably be even more bulbous around the back, though, but the concept is similar.

Dizzyfugu · July 26, 2019, 01:22:51 AM

Progress is good: both the air intake and the engines have been successfully integrated, but somehow the original tail did not look "right". Caused some headaches, until I found a leftover MiG-15 fin in the spares box, which will make the Tunnan look faster and be a better visual match for the wings with their 45° sweep. But now the search for suitable stabilizers has been opened... However, this late change necessitates some further mods at the tail - my plan is now to extend the fin's trailing edge downwards, to the fairing between the two engines (an area which needs some filling, anyway). I guess that the profile will look very tail-heavy through this move - but actually it's just a thin, vertical fairing.

Dizzyfugu · July 28, 2019, 01:27:55 AM

Still too hot for Bastang II pics, so I keep working on this project. Things keep moving, and I am closing in on painting (classic NMF). The new fin has also been completed - with modified stabilizers from a Matchbox Buccaneer. Sounds odd, but it works, and now the look is quite consistent with the Ta 183 wings, which also look disturbingly natural on the J29.
Landing gear has also been partially mounted and modified - since the aircraft now looks very tail-heavy (fat bottoms and the swept fin), I tried to lengtehn the wheelbase and mode the wheels backwards with small arms, while retaining the OOB main struts. Worked so far, technically, but I am not certain about the visual effect.

Dizzyfugu · July 30, 2019, 12:08:44 AM

Basic painting (NMF) finished, decals and details follow. This thing loks ...strange! But also surprisingly plausible, except for the wide hips, though. Has a certain French look to it , at least in my eyes. Probably due to the oval air intake and the cruciform tail. Quite SM2B-esque, despite the high wings.

Dizzyfugu · July 30, 2019, 11:51:54 PM

Decals applied, looks really good!

Old Wombat · July 31, 2019, 12:04:30 AM

Tease! Tease! Tease!

Dizzyfugu · July 31, 2019, 01:41:40 AM

Dizzyfugu · August 04, 2019, 02:32:43 AM

It took a while, but here's the WiP part of the build with pictures:

The kit and its assembly:
Sweden is a prolific whiffing territory, and the Saab 29 offers some interesting options. I actually had the idea of a two-engine J29 in the back of my mind for a long time, spawned by a resin conversion set for the Hasegawa B-47 Stratojet kit that came with new intakes and exhaust sections for the four engine pods. The single engine pod parts had been spent a long time ago, but the twin engine parts were still waiting for a good use. Could the exhaust fit under/into a Tunnan...?
I even had a Matchbox J29 stashed away for this experiment long ago, as well as some donor parts like the wings, and the GB eventually offered the right motivation to put those things together that no one would expect to work.

1:72 Saab P29G "Kurviga Tunnan" a.k.a. "Karpen"; 2nd prototype "Röd Urban" (s/n 29488), fitted with experimental 45° wings, Swedish Air Force during high speed trials; Malmslätt, Sweden, summer 1959 (Whif/Matchbox kit conversion) - WiP by dizzyfugu, on Flickr

So I pulled out all the stuff and started – a rather straightforward affair. Work started with the fuselage, which was, together with the (very nice) cockpit assembled OOB at first, the nose filled with as much lead as possible and with the lower rear section cut away, so the B-47 resin jet nozzles would end up at the same position as the original RM2B exhaust. Due to the pen nib fairing between them, though, the profile of the modified tail became (visually) more massive, and I had to fill some gaps under the tail boom (with styrene sheet and putty). The twin engines also turned out to be wider than expected – I had hoped for straight flanks, but the fuselage shape ended up with considerable bulges behind the landing gear wells. These were created with parts from drop tank halves and blended into the rest of the lower hill with PSR work. In the same wake the area under the fin was sculpted and re-created, too.

1:72 Saab P29G "Kurviga Tunnan" a.k.a. "Karpen"; 2nd prototype "Röd Urban" (s/n 29488), fitted with experimental 45° wings, Swedish Air Force during high speed trials; Malmslätt, Sweden, summer 1959 (Whif/Matchbox kit conversion) - WiP by dizzyfugu, on Flickr

1:72 Saab P29G "Kurviga Tunnan" a.k.a. "Karpen"; 2nd prototype "Röd Urban" (s/n 29488), fitted with experimental 45° wings, Swedish Air Force during high speed trials; Malmslätt, Sweden, summer 1959 (Whif/Matchbox kit conversion) - WiP by dizzyfugu, on Flickr

At that point it became clear that I had to do more on the fuselage, esp. the front end, in order to keep the aircraft visually balance. A convenient solution became an F-100 air intake, which I grafted onto the nose instead of the original circular and round-lipped orifice – with its sharp lip the Super Sabre piece was even a plausible change! The fuselage shapes and diameters differed considerably, though, more PSR became necessary.

1:72 Saab P29G "Kurviga Tunnan" a.k.a. "Karpen"; 2nd prototype "Röd Urban" (s/n 29488), fitted with experimental 45° wings, Swedish Air Force during high speed trials; Malmslätt, Sweden, summer 1959 (Whif/Matchbox kit conversion) - WiP by dizzyfugu, on Flickr

Next came the wings: I had already set apart a pair of trapezoid wings with a 45° sweep angle – these were left over from a PM Model Ta 183 conversion some time ago. With their odd shape and size they were a perfect match for my project, even more so due to the fact that I could keep the original J29 wing attachment points, I just had to shorten and modify the trailing edge area on the fuselage. The result was very conclusive.

1:72 Saab P29G "Kurviga Tunnan" a.k.a. "Karpen"; 2nd prototype "Röd Urban" (s/n 29488), fitted with experimental 45° wings, Swedish Air Force during high speed trials; Malmslätt, Sweden, summer 1959 (Whif/Matchbox kit conversion) - WiP by dizzyfugu, on Flickr

With the new nose and the wings in place, the overall proportions became clearer: still tail-heavy, but not unpleasant. At this time I was also certain that I had to modify the tail surfaces. The fin was too small and did not have enough sweep for the overall look, and the stabilizer, with its thick profile, rounded edges and the single, continuous rudder did not look supersonic at all. What followed was a long search in the donor banks for suitable replacements, and I eventually came up with a MiG-15 fin (Hobby Boss) which was later clipped at the top for a less recognizable profile. The stabilizers were more challenging, though. My solution eventually became a pair of modified stabilizers from a Matchbox Buccaneer(!), attached to the MiG-15 fin.

1:72 Saab P29G "Kurviga Tunnan" a.k.a. "Karpen"; 2nd prototype "Röd Urban" (s/n 29488), fitted with experimental 45° wings, Swedish Air Force during high speed trials; Malmslätt, Sweden, summer 1959 (Whif/Matchbox kit conversion) - WiP by dizzyfugu, on Flickr

1:72 Saab P29G "Kurviga Tunnan" a.k.a. "Karpen"; 2nd prototype "Röd Urban" (s/n 29488), fitted with experimental 45° wings, Swedish Air Force during high speed trials; Malmslätt, Sweden, summer 1959 (Whif/Matchbox kit conversion) - WiP by dizzyfugu, on Flickr

The design problems did not stop here, though: the landing gear caused some more headaches. I wanted to keep the OOB parts, but especially the main legs would leave the aircraft with a very goofy look through a short wheelbase and a rear axis position too much forward. In an attempt to save the situation I attached swing arms to the OOB struts, moving the axis maybe 5mm backwards and widening the track by 2mm at the same time. Not much in total, but it helped (a little, even though the aircraft is still very tail-heavy)

As a final addition – since the original, wing-mounted pitots of the J29 were gone now and would not go well with the wing-switching idea – I gave the P29G a large, nose-mounted pitot and sensor boom, placed on top of the nose. This part come, like the air intake, from an F-100.

1:72 Saab P29G "Kurviga Tunnan" a.k.a. "Karpen"; 2nd prototype "Röd Urban" (s/n 29488), fitted with experimental 45° wings, Swedish Air Force during high speed trials; Malmslätt, Sweden, summer 1959 (Whif/Matchbox kit conversion) - WiP by dizzyfugu, on Flickr

1:72 Saab P29G "Kurviga Tunnan" a.k.a. "Karpen"; 2nd prototype "Röd Urban" (s/n 29488), fitted with experimental 45° wings, Swedish Air Force during high speed trials; Malmslätt, Sweden, summer 1959 (Whif/Matchbox kit conversion) - WiP by dizzyfugu, on Flickr

Painting and markings:
I tend to be conservative when it comes to liveries for what-if models, and the P29G is no exception. At first, I thought that this build could become an operational supersonic daylight interceptor (the J29G), so that I could give the model full military markings and maybe a camouflage paint scheme. However, this idea would not work: the potential real life window for such an aircraft, based on the Saab 29, would be very narrow. And aircraft development in the late Fifties made quantum leaps within a very short period of time: While the J29A entered service, work on the Mach 2 Saab 35 was already underway – nobody would have accepted (or needed) a Mach 1 fighter, based on late Forties technology, at that time anymore, and there was the all-weather Saab J32B around, too. The update program with new wings and a more powerful afterburner engine was all that could be done to exploit the Tunnan's potential, resulting in the (real world's) J29E and F variants.

I eventually decided that the J29G would only be a prototype/research aircraft, consequently called P29G, and through this decision I became more or less settled upon a NMF finish with some colorful markings. Consequently, the model was painted with various shades of metal colors, primarily Polished Aluminum Metallizer from Humbrol, but also with Humbrol 191 and Matt Aluminum Metallizer as well as ModelMaster Steel Metallizer. Around the exhaust section, I also used Revell 91 (Iron) and ModelMaster Exhaust Metallizer. Some single panels and details were painted with Revell 99 (Aluminum), and I also used generic decal material in silver to simulate some smaller access panels. Grey decal sheet was used to simulate covers for the cannon nozzles.

1:72 Saab P29G "Kurviga Tunnan" a.k.a. "Karpen"; 2nd prototype "Röd Urban" (s/n 29488), fitted with experimental 45° wings, Swedish Air Force during high speed trials; Malmslätt, Sweden, summer 1959 (Whif/Matchbox kit conversion) - WiP by dizzyfugu, on Flickr

1:72 Saab P29G "Kurviga Tunnan" a.k.a. "Karpen"; 2nd prototype "Röd Urban" (s/n 29488), fitted with experimental 45° wings, Swedish Air Force during high speed trials; Malmslätt, Sweden, summer 1959 (Whif/Matchbox kit conversion) - WiP by dizzyfugu, on Flickr

The cockpit interior was painted, according to Saab 29 standard, in a dark greenish-grey (Revell 67), and bluish grey was used inside of the landing gear wells (Revell 57). The pitot boom received black and white stripes.

For markings I let myself get inspired from the real world Saab 29 and 32 prototypes, which were all marked with a colored "U" tactical code on the fin and also on the front fuselage, simply meaning "Utverding" (= "Test"). I found four red decals, and I also gave the aircraft a yellow cheatline, lent from an Airfix F-86D decal sheet. The Swedish roundels come from a generic aftermarket sheet, most stencils were taken from the Revell OOB sheet and a Printscale J29 sheet.

Before the model was sealed with semi-gloss acrylic varnish from Italeri, some grinded graphite was rubbed onto the rear fuselage, adding a metallic shine and simulating exhaust stains. Looks very down-to-earth, but overall more plausible than expected.

1:72 Saab P29G "Kurviga Tunnan" a.k.a. "Karpen"; 2nd prototype "Röd Urban" (s/n 29488), fitted with experimental 45° wings, Swedish Air Force during high speed trials; Malmslätt, Sweden, summer 1959 (Whif/Matchbox kit conversion) - WiP by dizzyfugu, on Flickr

In the meantime this build has been finished, beauty shots have been made but need editing - will be posted together with the aircraft's backgorund in a couple of days.

Gondor · August 04, 2019, 02:51:42 AM

Difficult to tell what the base aircraft was.

Gondor

zenrat · August 04, 2019, 03:17:35 AM

Looks very plausible.
Roll on the beauty pics.

Dizzyfugu · August 04, 2019, 03:56:32 AM

To me, this thing has either a French look (SM2Besque, probably due to the squashed air intake and the cruciform tail), or it could be a supersonic development of the Argentinian FMA Pulqui II - just some different markings, and the strory would work, too.