Azur | Polikarpov I-16 Type 10

Reviewed by Gino Dykstra

I'm not going to even embarrass myself by saying how much I'd been looking forward to this kit for literally decades. Suffice it to say that when Squadron offered it under their New Issues section I immediately plunked down for a couple of them. I'll no doubt be getting more as time goes on.

In a nutshell, this is the feisty little monoplane that the Soviet Union began the Great Patriotic War with. Its origins, even without researching, are pretty clear, as I set the kit down next to my Williams Brothers Gee Bee R1 racing airplane and was more than a little surprised to see that dimensionally it's quite a close match. The wings are longer on the Rata, but otherwise they're clearly kin.

The kit itself comes in the standard Azur box, with several sprues of fairly soft grey plastic, two bits in resin, a small photo etch sheet and a clear sprue. The layout is pretty standard, although there are a few surprises.

On the plus side, the kit supplies two different spinners. The cockpit is also considerably more accessible than their previous Dewoutine kit, partially because the Rata has almost always been an open-cockpit aircraft. In addition to this, though, they include two separate cockpit doors. The left one can be used as-is, but you'll have to carve off the right door to use the separate piece. The resin parts included are for the engine exhausts as well as an incredibly delicate gun sight. The photoetch sheet provides very nice seat belts for the interior as well as gunnery sight and bead. Although the kit is supplied as an I-16 Type 10, it's fairly easy to retrograde it back to a Type 5. Simply sand down the mounting plates on the fuselage for the machine guns, and ditto for the gun tubes and T-shaped intake on the engine grill.

On the negative side, the kit has no engine whatsoever - something pretty surprising for a radial-engined craft! Instead, they've elected to mold the engine grills shut. In addition, the decal sheet is surprisingly limited. Although they offer no less than three different schemes for Spanish Civil War aircraft, there's not a single Russian marking provided. I can only presume they'll offer these in a later incarnation of this model.

Still, it's a neat kit, and I elected to play a little with it to see what I could do with some of its deficits. The first issue, of course, was the engine. Admittedly, there's nothing wrong with building it with closed grills, but I thought I could do better with a bit of effort. Fortunately, the softness of the plastic lends itself to modifications, so I simply carved out all the grills, as well as opened the gun tubes and the difficult little T-slot intake at the bottom. A standard Williams Brothers 9-piston engine sits absolutely perfectly behind the grills, lending a more three-dimensional look to the engine face.

I did a few other simple modifications, such as dropping the stabilizers for a more natural look. I also drilled out the center of the main wheels and made a matching hole in the wheel bays - the Rata used a mechanical pulley system to crank its wheels up, the wires running from the center of the wheel hub up into an ill-defined opening in the bays. I couldn't find a decent shot of the wheel bay to see the cranking mechanism, so simply drilled a small hole for each. No doubt I'll find the information at a later date sometime.

The ailerons are shallowly defined on the wings, so it's worthwhile scribing them a bit deeper. Also, on building the interior, I discovered that the control panel doesn't fit the interior of the fuselage at all well. There's a certain amount of carving ahead to get it to slide into place, but once again, it's not a real problem.

All in all, this is a terrific kit of a pugnacious and stubborn little craft. I'll be sending more pics as I finish this little beauty.

Azur | Polikarpov I-16 Type 10

Reviewed by Gino Dykstra

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