21st Century Toys Macchi C 202
By Gino Dykstra
This is the kit that first got me fired up about the wonderful 21st Century Toys kits. Who else had, up to that point, cranked out an Italian aircraft in styrene . . . and at such a ridiculously reasonable price?
Like the others in their line, these kits are simply their "built-ups" without the buildup, meaning they have large screw holes covered by caps, and the build is as simplified as it can be and still remain more or less to scale. This kit, unlike some of their later pieces, had a few extra challenges to contend with.
First, you have to get rid of those pesky screw holes! I found that a paper punch provides a much nicer filler than the somewhat rubbery caps included with the model. That, plus patience and extensive use of filler did the trick on my kits. I strongly recommend you handle this process before any other assembly work.
There are a couple of places where the molding work fell down a bit. First, the guns. The wing guns are molded as little blips riding on the top of the wing. I ground out these mounts and replaced them with aluminum tubing. The fuselage guns are nonexistent, so some more aluminum tubing took care of that problem. You may also want to drill out the prop hub while you’re at it.
The landing gear is little troublesome and requires a bit of work to make acceptable. First, loose the inside working gear doors and extend the clearly-marked centerline stiffener with a piece of plastic strip -- a fairly easy job, as it's almost the exact size of a Plastruct item. You can replace the inner wheel flaps with sheet styrene cut to size. Second, you may want to thin down the landing gear wheel yolks, as they seemed quite oversized to me. Admittedly, I don't have a lot of research material on this aspect of the craft, but thinning them down did make them look far less toy-like. Thirdly, the secondary struts, which are intended to work on the model, are seriously underlength.
I replaced them with some telescoping aluminum tubing. This aspect of the aircraft is where most of your additional work is likely to go. They made some attempts to replicate the wheel wells, but honestly, I have no idea how much is accurate or even there. I threw just a few fiddle-faddles into mine to make them look tolerable. Lastly, the stabilizers are grossly over-thick and detailed with exaggerated detail.
I cut off the flaps, Sanded everything as thin as I could and removed all the overdone details. I think they look much better as a result.
The cockpit is fine, except for an extraneous hole in the control panel that didn't seem to belong. I filled that in, but can hardly complain as the rest of the cockpit is really quite lovely and even includes a decent gun sight. The decals, of course, are the highlight of this kit, and I've never had it so good. I made two different craft just to see what I could whip out, made another for a customer, and intend to do at least three more. There are just so many interesting schemes for this aircraft!
In addition, 21st Century Toys has also released a kit of the MC-205 which is the descendant of this aircraft, with wing cannon and some other minor differences. I intend to do one in the late-war Luftwaffe scheme and another one in the post-war early Egyptian desert scheme. What fun!
© Gino Dykstra
This article was published on Friday, September 27 2013; Last modified on Saturday, May 14 2016