To Gun aircraft MiG-29

Model Airplane News, Mar 1998 by Eichstedt, David

Y LOVE AFFAIR WITH THE MiG-29 began during the summer of 1986. I was enduring the hot, sticky days of Plebe Summer at the U.S. Naval Academy, and the blockbuster hit "Top Gun" had just taken the silver screen by storm. "Dangerzone" echoed across the courtyards of Bancroft Hall, and it seemed as if every midshipman wanted to be a fighter pilot. The F-14 was the ultimate goal of those future aviators, but which aircraft would be their adversary?

Western intelligence was aware of a new Soviet aircraft that was radically different from any of its predecessors. Dubbed the Fulcrum, it was known to be a twin-engine, twin-tail plane roughly the size of the F-18, but that was about all they knew. Then, on July 1, 1986, the West got their first good look at the MiG-29 when six Fulcrums arrived at the Kuopio Rissala air base in Finland. I first saw the aircraft on the cover of Aviation Week and Space Technology, and it was love at first sight.

It's easy to admire the MiG-29 for its performance, but what's impressive about the Fulcrum is that it delivers all this in a relatively crude package. A good engineer is not one who can design an airplane from unobtainium, but one who works with what he has at his disposal to produce a functional design. At this the Russians excel. Apparently, so does Top Gun Aircraft Inc . THE KIT The Top Gun MiG-29 Fulcrum is neither the next Scale Masters winner nor a 200mph speed demon. It's just a greatflying, good-looking, entry-level sport jet for the average modeler. Some of its features seem crude, such as the way the elevator and aileron servos protrude into the airflow. But these features make the model easy to maintain and, well, functional, just like the real MiG-29.

Before starting on the jet, I made a thorough study of the kit to understand the assembly sequence and construction details. As a result. I made a few changes to my kit. The instructions were better than many, but they still left a few ambiguities for the builder in some areas. I'll detail both the changes and the vague sections in this article. CONSTRUCTION

Fuselage. Fuselage construction is very simple. as there are only two bulkheads and a couple of plywood servo mounts to install. The main bulkhead serves as the mount for the fan, engine, landing gear and wing spars. I was a little confused about the location of this bulkhead, as it butts up against the aft side of the engine access hatch. This would be simple if there were not a large fillet in that same location. Rather than sanding a radius in the bulkhead. I simply glued it as far forward as possible, about 1/4 inch behind the hatch opening, and this worked out well. While on the subject of fillets, I found the fuselage to have several of them. They're used during fuselage layup to help the cloth lay smoothly in the mold. Unfortunately, they add a lot of weight, too. and I think Top Gun could have used smaller fillets to reduce the models weight.

The landing-gear mounting pieces are lii-inch, laser-cut plywood, and they're pre-drilled for Spring Air' no. 101 HD mains. I assembled them but didn't install them until wing construction was complete. Once the wings were finished, I used the wing spars to help get the landing-gear mount alignment just right.

I discovered two small, triangular. 1/4-inch plywood pieces that are mounted to the outboard side of the vertical web near the bottom. These pieces, which weren't mentioned in the instructions and were barely visible in one photograph, are crucial to helping align the gear. Omit them and you'll find gear installation a pain in the neck!

The forward bulkhead came pre-drilled for the Spring Air nose gear. Using the supplied 3/16-inch nose strut and a dual nose wheel assembly from Bob Fiorenze*1/4, the nose gear wasn't long enough to provide any angle of attack for the wings during takeoff. Rather than trying to bend a new gear, I lowered the gear mechanism onto the bulkhead by using the lower mounting holes as the upper holes and drilled two new lower holes near the bottom of the bulkhead. Problem solved.

The engine hatch is a separate molding and I removed about 1/8 inch of fiberglass from the bottom to fit it properly into the matching recess. To achieve a good fit for the canopy frame, which is also molded separately, I removed about l/8 inch of material from the bottom. The hatch was easy to sand, but sanding the canopy frame took more effort since it has about 1/2 inch of solid, filled epoxy around the base. Although the kit has a clear canopy, the cockpit kit must be purchased separately. It's highly detailed and looks great, but it's not too accurate and rather heavy, as well. Still, for a standoff-scale kit like this one, it serves its purpose well, and it perfectly offset the extra weight in the tail from the rudder hardware I had installed.

Wings. The wings are conventional balsasheeted foam construction with a simple plywood spar for carrying the flight loads into the fuselage. The wing sheeting is not pre-joined, but the balsa provided is good quality, and joining the sheets is a simple task. Strip ailerons of standard aileron stock are a nice touch; they're simple and very effective. Installation of the spar is the most significant change I made to the kit. The instructions tell you to simply gouge a hole in the completed wings, poke some epoxy down the hole and shove in the spar, but this approach doesn't provide a load path from the sheeting to the spar. Before sheeting the wings, cut a slot in the cores for the spar to ride in. A band saw works best for this. Next, cap the top and bottom edges of the spar with enough -inch balsa to stick out above and below the wing. After gluing the spar and caps in place, apply two widths of masking tape around the caps and sand them flush with the foam surface. Sheeting of the wings can proceed from there. Empennage. The tail surfaces are 1/4-inch balsa, so their construction is elementary. Functioning rudders were not a feature of the kit, so I made them myself using strip aileron hardware from Du-Bro1/4. I installed a 1/4-inch-square spruce trailing edge that runs from the bottom of the vertical to the top of the rudder. This modification helped stiffen the verticals and provided a solid mount for the rudder hinges.