UFO "Shado Sky-1" in 1/72 scale

Made from the Japanese "Marmit" brand multimedia kit

Hi everyone!

This is my first project post on this site so hopefully, things will go well here as I’m still trying to familiarize myself with this format. As I get the hang of it and post more projects, the overall quality of the postings should improve.

Meanwhile, let’s have a look at this model all finished up…

The Sky-1 was seen as the front flying section of a submersible called “SkyDiver” in the 1969 Gerry Anderson TV show called “UFO”. The idea was that it would patrol the oceans of Earth underwater and when a threat was near the submarine would tilt with its nose pointed towards the surface and launch this aircraft from the water to intercept the alien threat.

The model itself, built for a customer in Florida who hires me for many projects, measures less than 8” long with a 7-inch wingspan. The kit was made mostly from solid resin with some white metal parts and came impressively with turned aluminum engine exhaust nozzles which is very rare even for a multimedia kit. The quality is terrific with the only fiddly parts being the tiny vac-formed cockpit windows which were difficult to fit perfectly and a very close-quartered cockpit interior. The cockpit is very well detailed with a pilot figure, ejection seat, instrument panel and control stick but these details are practically invisible when the canopy is in place. The instructions were all written in Japanese of course but the drawings were printed very crudely making them extremely difficult to understand. But it came with every nice professionally shot photos of the finished model which were actually more useful than the instructions.

The decals were another disappointment. Although many could be rescued, almost all of the striping decals fractured forcing me to slice up vinyl pinstriping tape to use for the stripes. Fortunately, the decals for the white printed text did not fracture.

Below are some more pictures of the finished model.

I made a stand using an MDF board and a piece of 1/2” acrylic rod. It was mounted to the model with a small 1/16” steel pin drilled into the clear rod to minimize the size of the hole that needed to be drilled into the model.

Here is a closeup of the turned aluminum engine nozzle with the white metal “turbine” detail inside.

The bottom of the finished model…

Here is the right side of the model which, I don’t think was ever seen on the show itself. Pretty sure they only shot the left side but I could be mistaken.

OK, that about does it for this post.

I hope you enjoyed this very first project post from Small Art Works on this Substack blog site. As suitable projects come along I hope to post many more in the near future. Please subscribe, feel free to comment and stay tuned!