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The Vostok spacecraft carried Soviet Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin on the first manned space flight on 12 April, 1961. Gagarin completed one orbit of the earth before a troublesome re-entry and ejection from the Sharik sphere, completing his journey by parachute.
The Space Race had begun.
The Vostok spacecraft was based on the Soviet R-7 Intercontinental Ballistic Missile. This design undertook eleven launches between December 1960 and June 1963. |  | |
| Kit details... |
| Manufacturer: | Cutting Edge Modelworks | | Scale: | 1/144 | | Parts: | 34 | | Built: | January 2008 - February 2008 | | Aftermarket kits: | None | | Add-ons: | None | | | |
| Building the base stand... |
| I will be using the latest deathstar base created by Triliance. The deathstar tiles that actually come with the base will not be used. |  | | posted: 02-02-2008 | | | Here you can see the base painted with a rosewood kind of coloured glaze. The MDF-plate really looks like it has been made out of some kind of wood.
I sprayed a glossy cote on it after the paint had dried to give it a nice shine. |  | | posted: 09-02-2008 | | |
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| Building the kit... |
The first part of the process is always cutting the flash off the resin parts.
Here I have the boosters and the bottom engine plates finished. |  | | posted: 03-01-2008 | | | I finished clearing all the flash from the parts. The small V-shaped parts were tedious and one of the halves broke. A little superglue fixed the issue.
I then attached the engine plates to the bottom of the boosters and applied a little putty where needed. |  | | posted: 03-01-2008 | | | I sanded the puttied seams and glued two boosters to the main body. I then attached the small rods to the two boosters.
It was kind of tedious getting the other two boosters with the attached rods to fit in with the already glued ones but I luckily succeeded.
The last photo shows all four boosters being attached to the main body. | |    | | posted: 04-10-2008 | | | | I carefully placed the V-shaped parts onto the top of the main body. There were small holes already drilled out which resulted in a perfect fit with the V-shaped parts.
The two exhaust vents were also glued in place. | |   | | posted: 10-01-2008 | | | | The final step in the assembly process was glueing the little engine bells to the bottom plates of the boosters. This was something that has cost me almost half an hour...
The kit is now up for a paintjob. |  | | posted: 21-01-2008 | | | | I chose flat white and a certain shade of green in combination with burnt metalizer to spray paint on this Vostok kit. This photo shows how far along I came today. |  | | posted: 23-01-2008 | | | I finished painting the kit last week but did not come around to weathering it.
Today I finally started with the weathering. | |   | | posted: 29-01-2008 | | | |
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| Painting the model... |
I used the following paints on this model.
ModelMaster Burnt Metalizer (colour number 851415)
ModelMaster Medium Green (colour number 874734)
ModelMaster Flat White (colour number 851768) | |
| Overall experience... |
It took me well over one year to actually get hold of this kit. Several times when I ordered it, I shortly after received an email saying the kit was out of production or out of stock.
The overall assembly was pretty straight forward and I did not had a lot of setbacks. Painting the kit was done after the complete model was built and this was in some way challenging because it was hard masking off certain parts.
In short: this kit is a real winner. It is extremely detailed considering its small scale. | |
| More photos... |
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