I started out talking about this on Zealot, but in the tradition I'm seeing of redundant posting I'm gonna share here too:
On a mad whim, I bought and downloaded
Kaptohhar Konnr's big, beautiful Tu-95
BEAR model off ECardmodels.
I've always loved this aircraft; actually I'm a fan of Andrei Tupolev from way back--my flying buddy & I drew up ANT-3/R3 record breaker / propaganda machine / spyplane for Free Flight Rubber--and I admire the guy's surviving the TsAGI purge and coming out on top as the '50s went on.
The Tu-95 / Tu-114 airframe is pure Soviet bravado: while building a long-range bomber and keeping it as under wraps as possible, let's also make a
civvy version, and do regular long flights with it, like f'rinstance Moscow to Havana nonstop. "...Are we sending a
MESSAGE, vain Capitalists?..."
Love it.
The downloaded kit is to be printed out on A3 paper for a 1/33 model; I can't do that, and 1/33 is too big for my little eagle's aerie, four walkup floors up here in Brooklyn...I reduced the nicely-dense files to ~1/50, which still leaves me a one-meter wingspan model.
I'm concerned that the shrinking will get me bad consequences as I try to wrap reduced skins around reduced formers--I'm intending to use 110# for most of the build (the instructions are beyond my casual efforts to translate) and, short of fitting and filing, does anybody out there have some experience with this sort of mod?
'Duster