Last summer at the IPMS/USA nationals in Columbus, OHIO, I ran across the
Dragon stand were they had a quite colorful box standing with a
Chinese rocket. Mike Idacavage managed to buy the only kit then available and
was so kind to have me take it back to The Netherlands. Finally in
December I found the time to put this kit together. Well on their first civil rocket kit I have to congratulate Dragon. To start with the boxart is very attractive, showing a painting of the rocket lifting off against a sunset. Upon opening, the box is crammed with parts, all plastic runners individually wrapped in plastic and some rather chunky body parts, a manual, clearly printed decal sheet and a stand. Upon close inspection it turns out the main body, payload fairing and solid rockets are made of blown plastic. The halves are unfortunately clearly visible, on the plus side it has raised detail.
The seams are easily removed from the blown plastic parts, care has to be taken not to damage the raised detail. Fine details are replicated with injection molded plastic, these consist of solid motor bottoms, rocket nozzles and cable trays and lox feed lines. The parts fit together very well, although filler is required between the injected plastic and blowmolded parts. There is some clean-up required for the ribbed sections, but nothing very serious. I'm especially pleased how the rocket nozzles are made up, no halves fitting together, but a one piece nozzle to which a ring has to be glued. The only drawback on the kit are the cable trays that have to be glued on the solid rocket motors. You have to carefully remove raised detail where the plastic strip will come, otherwise there will be a gap between the plastic part and the solid's body. I shaved the raised parts off with a razor blade, which worked very well. First hold the plastic part to blow-molded part, mark with a pencil what has to be removed and then carefully slice it off.