So: being older than dirt, I started building kits in the '50's. One of the kits I built with my brother was the Revell IL-38 Bison bomber. This was actually the first revision of the MYA-4 which created a Bomber Gap scare in the West, but was actually too slow, short-legged, and low flying to be a real competitor to the B-52. It was supplanted by the TU-95 Bear and eventually some of the improved version with better engines were modified to carry the Soviet Buran Space Shuttle.
Being kids we basically glue bombed it together, and we had no paint, so it remained in the original Russian Armor Green plastic. Nevertheless it was a sleek design of the type I have a soft spot for, and call the hood ornament school of aerodynamics. Looks slick and futuristic, so surely it should fly well.
The orginal kits with the glorious Leynwood box art are now highly collectibe, but at the Buena Park swap meet I came across an edition reboxed as a Mexican Revell Lodela issue. Perhaps because of the origin it was an absolute steal so I snapped it up and built it
I painted it in various metallics, and added the transparencies framing with strips of painted invisible tape. The engine openings are just blanks so instead of trying to create turbine faces I just filled them with FOD covers. The decals were ancient but in this case the old-style raised decal outlines you normally sand off, made it easy to color in the markings using Sakura Gelly Roll pens.
As a tribute I elected to leave the external Revell copyright molding.
Building the same model again after 60 years was the most fun I've had modeling in a long time!