Alabama modeler and doctor, Dr. David Geldmacher ,has started blogging. I highly recommend you visit his blog. What the good doctor has done is embarrass the heck out of me. He has managed to post more actual modeling content in the last three weeks than I’ve managed to post in the last 6 months. I post a lot of links to modeling news and interesting current events, but I’ve gotten away from actual blogging about building models, which is the reason that I started this blog in the first place. Well I am rededicating the blog to that purpose. I’ll still post the other stuff, but there will be a lot more model building stuff too.
The SS-4 is a Soviet Intermediate Range Ballistic Missile. It was one of the missiles at the heart of the Cuban missile crisis. This model covers a couple of modeling interests for me. I like to do missiles and spacecraft and the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban missile crisis are subjects I am interested in.
Luckily for me, the Canadian company, Belcher Bits, has come out with a resin kit of the SS-4. I managed to pick a copy up at the IPMS/USA Nationals in Omaha in July. As you can imagine, there aren’t that many parts to the kit, since, like most missiles, it is little more than a tube on top of a launch platform.
The parts are well molded in gray resin. They are well detailed with engraved panel lines. There ares some mold lines and pour plugs to remove, but nothing beyond the ability of most every modeler. However, some of the missile body parts have locating keys that could be mistaken for pur stubs. Don’t remove these by accident. There are also a few seam lines that must be sanded down.
The kit doesn’t come with decals, which makes sense because the SS-4 doesn’t seem to have any markings in operational service. However, I may add a few stencils just to break up the overall Russian green color scheme.
Now for some additional preparation of parts and then the assembly begins.
