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.

Completed Review - Revell Easy Kit Concorde (06642)

Scale: 1/200, RRP - £12.99

Recently my wife became very interested in Concorde, for her it is perfection in aircraft form. For her interest is primarily civil aircraft where as mine is military.

Over the past few days she's been asking me if I could get her "a Concorde." I had offered to get a model kit and build one but apparently I spend far too long building and painting a model. I decided to look a die-cast models however for me as a modeller I felt they just lacked the detail that I'm used to. It was then that I encountered this Easy Kit from Revell and thought I'd give it a try.

First of all before I begin this review I'm going to say that it's not something I'd normally consider for myself. I understand it's a kit aimed at younger and novice modellers and so my review will reflect that. I've seen an increase in such kits (especially from Hobbyboss and Zvezda) and I certainly think they offer a good way into the hobby for beginners who'd be put off by the more complex kits as a starting point.

The kit comes in a nice box with the pre-painted tail section on display. Upon opening the box you get two pre-painted sprues, a single clear piece and an instruction sheet. The instruction are typical Revell black and white drawn instruction, in this case with a total of 7 steps.

I have to say I was quite impressed with the detail of the parts upon first seeing them, however I thought it would be difficult to remove some of the parts without damaging the paint, mostly where black painted parts were attached to a sprue. Also there was a slight error in the instructions, they seemed to suggest 3 parts were needed to build the cockpit windows when in the actual kit there was just one single part.

Construction began by fitting the windows and cockpit into one of the halves of the aircraft before snapping the other half together. Overall it was straight forward however there was a slight gap between the two. I see no reason why you couldn't glue the parts together but for the purpose of this review I decided not to use any glue.

Next up were the wings, the top and bottom halves clip together and then the body clips onto the wings, couldn't be easier and already I had a model looking like Concorde, all be it with a flat nose.

I added the nose and I have to say this was the only part I felt that was not detailed well in the instructions, it was very easy to put it on the wrong way round. And then I encountered exactly the issue I feared would happen. Removing the wheels from the sprues I found I was left with some very ugly white spots on the tyres.

 
I was left with no choice but to deviate from the "easy kit" and get a pot of black paint out to correct this. There is of course an option to build the kit with the landing gear up and given the weak nature of the landing gear I'd suggest you hold on to the parts in case the landing gear ever gets broken.

After that it was on to the final stage, adding the engines. Again the black painted parts need a slight bit of touching up but apart that it was a straight forward finish to this kit. Total build time, (including taking photographs and painting) had been 45 minutes.

So what did I think of this kit overall? It was a surprisingly fun build although I felt it needed a bit of painting to finish off neatly. The end result certainly looks like Concorde and I think it's nicer than the die-cast models I'd seen. For a simple model kit I did think it was a bit expensive but then again you don't have the cost of glues and paints, something I tend to forget as I've accumulated lots of them over many years of painting and building models.

Compared to die-cast models you do get your money's worth and you get the chance to actually build something which I think would be a good thing for younger modellers and those who are new to the hobby. The finished model looks good and my wife has put it on display, she finally has her Concorde. As for me, I'm thinking of that Easy Kit Lufthansa 747 that I saw on the shelf next to this one...

Overall score: 2.5 out of 5, a fun build which is exactly what the hobby should be about. Slightly let down by the need to get out the paint.