August's Chengdu pair - Finished!

[K5083]

Got the main painting done over the past couple of nights. It took about 90 minutes to mask the display team markings on the EB. Still quite a bit of touch-up, prepping and adding of detail parts, but these are gonna get done!



August

[ShaunW]

Nice pair August, it will be great to see them finished.

[Dazzled]

Really nice work and an interesting contrast between the two colour schemes.

[K5083]

The endgame with these two kits had plenty of unnecessary drama.

The landing gear as supplied with the kits is much too long, requiring removal of the locator pegs and 1mm of the main gear (that's a lot in 1/144 scale) and 2mm of the nose gear to look like it was not on stilts. The instructions direct you to put the main landing gear on backwards, with the struts inboard of the wheels rather than outboard. By the time these faults were corrected, each model had had its landing gear attached 3 or 4 times.

The markings of the August 1 display team as called out on the kit box/instructions and provided on the decal sheet did not match any photos of the team that I was able to find. The kit has no Chinese national insignia, so I had to dig in the decal stash for these. Luckily I have been planning to build several models of Chinese aircraft so I had some insignia of almost the correct size. The decals were also very reluctant to separate from the decal sheet and prone to breaking up. Altogether it was quite an ordeal to finish.









The generic F-7 presented fewer problems. The decals were correct and much better behaved. Markings are supplied for just one aircraft, and I have no idea why number 11147 was chosen. The F-7 does not have much of a combat history so any paint scheme choice is somewhat arbitrary. It would have been nice if Trumpeter had provided a few additional tactical numbers so the modeler could do some other aircraft. Same goes for the F-7EB, it would be nice to be able to do another aircraft in the team besides "01".

I varied the metal panels slightly by using a different steel paint for the tail cone and by going over a few of the panels with silver Sharpie. The effect looks pretty good and I think you can see a little of it in these photos.







Overall, I found these kits to be of mediocre quality and not very fun to build, partly for that reason and partly because 1/144 fighters are just too small and fiddly. If you can avert your eyes to some inaccuracies they look decent when completed. I've never built a MiG-21 before so was happy to be part of the GB!

August

[iggie]

A very tidy looking pair for such a small scale

[TobyC]

Great looking Migs. Especially like the display version

[ShaunW]

Great work with these little MiGs August, a fine pair indeed.