To begin with...

This turned out to be one of the main project I was doing recently... well not exactly "recently", "past 18 years" would be more precise. Right when it has been published, I've obtained what until now is the "Yak Bible" - a book by former Yakovlev bureau employee A.T.Stepanetz describing the genesis and history of WWII Yakovlev fighter family. It was a revelation.

The thing is - I am a modeler. I've been building models since before the school. My mom bought me a Plastikart kit of Yak-24 helicopter and helped me to assemble it. I vividly remember (almost 40 years later) that we've glued the glass for portholes from the outside. Dad wasn't too excited about this.

As time went by, I've progressed from Plastikart to Novo (ex-Frog) and then - with my first real salaries - to more advanced Western model kits. I moved from just quickly assembling kits, to painting with brush using de-canned automotive spray paints, to using an airbrush (a famous "Belorus"), to all of a sudden realizing that not all kits are perfect and you need to research the subject and add details, rescribe raised panel lines, etc., etc., etc.

The "research" part lead to the need for drawings. For every model I was building I tried to obtain some kind of plans. It was not very difficult for Western subject. But living in the Soviet Union, it was very difficult to find decent modeler's plans for Soviet subjects. By 1980's "Modelist-Konstructor", the central source for all Soviet handymen, started to publish drawings of Yak fighters more or less regularly. V.Kondratyev was the main contributor, and his plans were clearly based on originals. The only trouble was that he focused on Yak-7/9 family, and Yak-1 had never been adequately covered.

So when I went through the Stepanetz' "bible" and realized the connection between Yak-1 and Yak-7/9 families, I decided - just for the heck of it - to try and develop plans of Yak-1 by taking Kondratyev's plans and "backdating" them into Yak-1.

I keep doing it till now. 18 years... 4 jobs. 2 kids. Two new countries. MBA. PhD...

Still fun.

I want to share the story here.