After a year, this is finally done. The infamous J-20 surprised US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates when he visited China in 2011. There’s a lot of speculation about how good an aircraft this, how stealthy it is, etc but I think it’s safe to say it’s a pretty wicked looking aircraft.
I picked this up in September 2011 (which was when the kit showed up in the stores) and I worked on it off and on over the past year due to a few issues on the kit that I had to walk away from and think about to other things happening in regular life that took priority.
The kit is nice enough – very well engineered, but over-engineered in some aspects. The forward fuselage is one potential trouble area – it is split up into three sections – upper fuselage, and left and right forward fuselages. The nose wheel well fits on the bottom of the left and right fuselage halves – and the nose wheel well is made out of five pieces, by the way – and the nose wheel mount pins are on left and right sides of the wheel well, not the top, so the entire assembly has to be assembled early on, complicating other assembly and painting (fortunately the nose gear did not get broken off).
The rest of the aircraft assembled fairly well – I made one modification to the assembly steps – I left out the tail surfaces until the last minute, which means leaving out the little caps that hold it in place. The locator holes were really tight and had to be drilled out anyway. This is one other area that is in danger of snapping off during assembly, so I left it out. The tail surfaces are not glued on.
Painting was a challenge as I’ve always found that black paint on models tends to be too “black.” The resulting effect is that it absorbs all light around it, leaving little depth to the subject and looking like a black shape instead. I used Tamiya’s NATO Black instead, which has a slight greenish tint to it (but that goes away after applications of gloss and flat coats) and the end result is an off-black that looks reflects light slightly, giving it a little more depth. I also took a little artistic license with the panel line wash, using white paint instead of the usual dark gray (which would disappear on the paint surface anyway), giving it even more depth.
Masking the exhaust nozzles was a bear. I cut masking tape in to thin strips, then cut them in to little squares, and sticking each corner on every jagged panel line. The exhaust petals on the actual aircraft are fairly clean so I left weathering at a minimum (one of the prototypes has newer engine exhausts with stealthier jagged-edge exhaust petals).
Overall, this is a fantastic but challenging kit of an interesting aircraft. Trumpeter pulled out all the stops to make a really detailed kit out of the box, which is fitting as there is great pride in China for coming up with such a technological feat. I’d recommend this kit but make sure you take your time building it.
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