I've had a kit of the
Yak-6 made by Alpha rattling around for 20+ years in a container of started kits. It's not a good kit, despite its simplicity. I decided to finish the plane and not put too much effort into it since it's not worth the effort of super detailing... and it would guarantee that I would finish the model before I lost interest.
In the same container, I found a box with some old 1/72 Airfix Hs-129 parts (not enough for a complete kit) and another box with an ancient but also partial,
Lindberg Hs-129. From the brittleness of the plastic, it has to date from the 1960s.
So I decided to mix and match parts. I started by putting together the Yak-6 fuselage and noticed that it was too narrow for the canopy, so I widened it with styrene strips to improve the fit. I didn't like the radials on the Yak-6, so I replaced them with the Gnome-Rhône radials from the Hs-129. This involved some careful plastic surgery on the brittle Lindberg plastic (the engines were a better fit than the Airfix ones).
The box with the random aircraft bits also had the tail from an Airfix 1/72 Pe-2. The Yak-6 tail didn't spark joy, so after a quick surgery the vertical tail was removed and the two vertical stabilizers from the Pe-2 grafted onto the horizontal stabilizers.
The kit's side windows seem to have gone AWOL over the years. They were replaced with thin plastic and masked with Tamiya tape. I also did some minor detailing of the cockpit, with pilot seats from a Matchbox Ju-188, throttle stand and instrument panel from an Airfix B-25 and a styrene floor and bulkhead - the kit only comes with two seats and a blank ip slab.
Here's what it looked like after the first layer of primer:
The props are from the Airfix Hs 129:
I'm leaning towards a French aircraft from immediately after the war, hence the "Jacques Six" name. The plane is starting to look like a fixed gear version of the Beechcraft 18, too.
Here's after some paint:
The blobs of putty are there because I pulled off the masks too soon and I need to put on a semi-matte coat after decalling.