Completed Review – Hobby-Boss MiG-3 Easy Kit (80229)

Scale: 1:72, RRP - £5.99

The MiG-3 has been on my wish list for a while now. I had originally intended to build the Zvezda kit, based on the fact that Zvezda are Russian and so they surely must be able to produce a reasonable kit of a Russian icon. How wrong I was!

The Zvezda kit is actually a rebox of the frankly awful Revell kit which looks more like an abominable mix of a MiG-3 and Dewitine D.520. So this left me with the other option in 1:72 scale, Hobby-Boss's Easy Kit version.

I'm a bit sceptical when it come to "Easy Kits". While I appreciate the idea behind them is to get people into building models I do think the concept is somewhat flawed. Assembling a kit is only half the story and in my opinion painting a kit is always the more difficult part of any build. All I see easy kits as being is a quicker option of beginners reaching a point where they abandon a model because no-one provides them with an "Easy Paint" option to accompany the build.

Putting aside my thoughts on the easy kit part I was well aware that this kit was well regarded in the modelling community and so I was determined to see why.

On opening the box I found two large solid parts, the fuselage and the wings, a sprue of smaller parts and a clear sprue. The shape looked good, like a MiG-3 which was encouraging, even if the smaller parts did look a little soft on details and the plastic felt a little flimsy. Decal options were for two aircraft, one winter scheme, one summer scheme (although it should noted there's no way the red arrow decal will fit over the exhausts on the winter option).

To build it was a case of clip the fuselage to the wings, add a piece below the engine and you're just about there! Glue isn't necessarily needed for the larger parts but this isn't a snap fit kit either. There is, to my surprise two canopy options, one open, one closed. However the cockpit is a bit lacking in detail, if you're a scratch-builder then you'll probably feel the need to do something more with it. In my case I opted for the closed version so just chose to add some masking tape seatbelts and left it at that.

Total build time, including cutting and glueing...48 seconds!

From then on it was simply a case of finishing of the model prior to painting. Landing gear was a little on the weak side and I decided to leave off the rockets and only attach the launchers to the wing. All was fairly straight forward, living up to the easy build. Detail wise it's almost spot on, they even included the asymmetrical oiler coolers on each side of the engine! The only accuracy issues that I really noticed were a few missing panel lines and the doors to the tail wheel (there should be a leather cover rather than the doors).

As for painting I touched on that in a previous post, including my first airbrushed canopy. As it happens this model was actually serving as a tester for my new airbrush and so I picked a colour scheme similar to that of the P-51D I was working on. For the top colours I used several coats comprising of Tamiya's XF-62 (Dark Green) and XF-51 (Khaki Drab) and mixes of the two. For the underside I didn't really have any paints to hand that reflected a light VVS blue and so I used AS-7, Grey, which probably isn't as accurate as it could be.

Finally the decals, they were surprisingly good. There are two complete sets so the leftovers are going in the spares box, a man can never have enough good quality spare red stars!

The final result:

So I have say this kit far exceeded my expectations. Bearing in mind this is an easy kit and so I have to judge it on that basis Hobby-Boss have managed not only to produce an easy kit, but one that is more accurate than it's mainstream competitors. For this they have to be commended. Out of the box this is more than passable kit, and it's one with plenty of potential for extra detailing (albeit scratch-building).

I will hopefully revisit this kit at a later date as I practice working on panel lines, but for now it's done.

Overall Build Score: 3 out of 5, a complete surprise! Expensive for an easy kit but accurate beyond any of it's (non-easy kit) competitors. Either a good simple build or a more than worthy foundation for detailed build.