are lacking any wiring or piping;
in this scale, I would suggest there
should be something more. The
Eduard set added some details
but, given that I discourage people
from looking underneath my
models, I don’t know how much
it will be appreciated anyway.
I must mention the rather clever
way these parts are designed.
Maybe I just haven’t had a play
with an etched set for a while,
and this is old news to most
people, but the idea of etching
the plate with the stakes still just
connected at one end, so all you
have to do is to bend them back
into position and glue, is brilliant.With regards to the plastic,
as I was making the first stage of
the nose wheel bay I thought to
myself, “They really should think
about these gear door retractor
struts, they won’t make it through
the build”. In fact, one of them
didn’t even make to the end of the
subassembly, but I figured that
I would replace it later with any
others that become detached.
The kit supplies the option
(should you have enough references
to scratch-build some details),
to have the crew access hatch in
the nose bay open, so you can
see through the door into the
cockpit area. To keep my optionsopen, I left this sliding section
unattached at this stage.
The main gear bays fit together
nicely with some neat locating
tabs, and once these, the nose bay,
and the cockpit were fitted into
the appropriate fuselage half (split
top and bottom, rather obviously,
given the shape of the airframe), we
can get the fuselage joined up. The
exhausts are designed to slip in later
(thank you!), and the undercarriage
very near the end (THANK YOU!).
My, it is quite a large aircraft...
The instructions have you do
the engine exhausts next, followed
by the vertical tails, then the
canards, flaps, leading edge slats,and horizontal tails. But there is no
need to attach them now, (although
I did put the exhausts together),
so I thought I would skip forwards
and do the intakes first, because
the thing gets hard to hold with
all the tail surfaces and canards
attached (as I know from my Su-33).
The exhausts are made up from
six parts each, and they look good
out of the box. The Eduard set
supplies replacement afterburner-
ring parts with a clever push-pull
way of forming them: I found this
hard on the first go but the second
was a lot easier. To be honest,
though, I’m not sure how much
it adds, because the ring beyond8 • JANUARY 2018 • SCALE AVIATION MODELLER INTERNATIONAL
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