DreamModel 1/72 J-20S Dual Seat Mighty Dragon

[wm_cheng]

Hi all, I noticed there wasn't much on this kit here so I'd thought I post my recently finished J-20S here.

I liked the relatively obscure subject, unfortunately there weren't many 1/72 upgrade parts or even decent cockpit interior photos to go by so when I first received the kit, I thought I'd just do a quick straight out-of-the-box build.  When I saw how simplified the landing gears were, I'd thought I'd just build it closed up in flight mode but when the kit didn't have any pilots, that kind of blew that idea out of the water!  When I started to actually look at the kit, I realized that there were so many injector pin marks all over the place and lots of little sink puts on the parts that needed to be filled.  I decided that since it was lacking so much detail anyways, and I had very few good photographic references, I'd just cover up all the injector pins with fake detailing/greebles and hydraulic hoses instead of sanding them off, which was hard to do at 1/72 scale without obliterating what details there were.  Oh BTW they had mixed up their paint callouts where the main splinter camo had the light grey and dark greys switched.

Upon testing fitting I realized the back of the fuselage tended to sit flattened or squashed which is problem when trying to make them fit to the engine cowling.  I had to make a styrene jack to prop up the fuselage in the middle to fit the engines.  Once I started to detail the internal bays, I decided to start to dress up the landing gears as well.  Why do so many companies choose to omit the torque links for the oleo structs in 1/72 scale?  Luckily I had some spare parts from other planes I had done in flight to steal some torque links and start dressing with some lead wires for the hydraulic and electrical lines.

They had an option to have the upgraded WS-10 engines (too bad they didn't have the longer WS-15 nozzles - I see they had a 3D print on eBay for this upgrade, but they were expensive with shipping).  I had some kit spare burner cans from my FineMolds Phantom kit that I didn't use because I had 3D printed upgrades that ended up fitting quite nicely within the nozzle and created a second layer inside that resembled the WS-10 openings.

It was now that I had found some really nice pilots from the FineMolds Phantom kit that I never used because I wanted to show off those 3D printed seats and cockpit controls.  I think at 1/72 scale and with the lack of good references I could get away with 70s US flight uniforms over the PLAAF flight gear as long as I painted the helmets grey instead of white 😛

I had to build up certain areas to lessen the gaps and make the surfaces more level to minimize the amount of filling and sanding (the part of modeling which I hate!).  There were also a bunch of sink marks to fill and lots of short shots to re-build such as the weapons bay doors all had partially missing hinges that had to be built.  Oh I threw in a rare earth magnet in case I really fracked up and had to close everything up to build it in flight so I could attach a stand to it.  Because of that, I added some weights to the nose, not knowing if this is a tailsitter or not, but it seemed to have a lot behind the rear main gears - better to be safe than sorry.

I did the optical sensor pod now, it was really tiny to mask but not having much detail inside, I did a irredescent pearlescent light spray inside followed by a Tamiya clear red after that, and it turned out really well catching the light.  I think I will do this for the F-35 optical sensor chin pod.  

I followed the Mr. Color call outs on the instructions (noting that they were reversed - light was dark and dark was light) and it turned out darker than I had envisioned.  But I had wanted to dust a light mist of Aclad Dark Aluminum over top to try to re-create that metallic sheen that is so prevalent on the F-22 and F-35 schemes.  It worked out perfectly that it lightened the dark greys and tied everything together nicely and really affected the way the greys/camo looked depending on how the light hits the surfaces.

Now I know how I'm going to paint my F-22 or F-35 when I get to them.  I wished I had bought stock in Tamiya masking tape, amazing stuff, but you sure go through a lot of it.  I masked all the panels that were not metallic go over the camo.

Now my favourite time is to peel back the masking and remove the internal bay bucks to reveal the detailing and the landing gear scratch builds which turned out - so I'm pleased the extra effort paid off!

There's gotta be a better way to mask these missiles!  I thought since its always so hard to spray gloss white (lack of coverage) I thought I'd spray all the white parts first then mask them off to spray the darker blue (I mixed them to eye from the photos).  I thought I'd stick with all the airshow demonstrator blue non-live missiles (the white is so boring as there's so little actual graphics on live the PLAAF missiles) since it adds a little pop of color to an otherwise grey jet.

The kit missiles really suck, there were so many sink marks on the PL15s (that I had to fill) and the PL10s only had once side that was sharply molded, I tried to re-scribe the soft side.  I looked everywhere for any alternative 1/72 chinese missiles and couldn't find anything - closest were some Russian missiles but they didn't look right - argh!  Lastly since I was having the canopy open, in all the photos there are these white tubes (Cartridge Actuation Devices) in the front underside of the canopy (like the F-22) that seemed like it was a glaring omission.  Luckily being a pack rat, I scrounged my spare box and found some hydraulic actuators to landing gears I never used because I've build in-flight versions of Macross Valkries that ended up being the right size to fit under the forward canopy even when I had the canopy closed 🙂

So I noticed that there is a display thread area that I will show pictures of the finished model - but I'd put two here.

Thanks for watching!

 

This has been a surprise for me how nice this airframe actually looks, so many of the photos make it kind of long and bulky, but it's surprisingly sleek and beautiful, especially in 3D and having that second seater longer canopy has really taken up some room up top to better proportion the plane from an aesthetic point of view.  I just wish there were a better kit of it in 1/72 scale and some decent aftermarket upgrades.  Now I'm interested in getting a 1/72 J-35 - has anyone heard of the company UMa (I think its a new Hong Kong model company) that I'm hoping its decent.

 

Finished pictures here;

 

Edited January 9 by wm_cheng

[Thadeus]

Thanks for sharing pics. You J-20 came out great.

[Ruud]

nice work!