A first walk around promises a joyful time building this kit. The arrangement of the parts in the box gives you the feeling that you have done the right thing buying it. Moulding quality looks good though there is some flash here and there. Especially the huge lower fuselage and the slide moulded front fuselage parts are truly impressive.

6 attached images. Click to enlarge.

Thanks, Richard. I feel even more attracted by the Mig-25, but postponed her for a while to finally get my fingers on the AMK-kit.
On with the build ...

The instructions start with the engine intakes and wheel wells that are designed as one assembly unit per side. The insides of the intake halves have to be painted before assembling but due to external glue flaps, the paint job is not at risk when they go together. The instructions talk about "silver" for the entire assembly, the reference however indicates a pale, slightly silverish grey. The nice yellow primer bleeding through could not be missed here either.
The part break down and fit of this entire section of the kit is remarkably good and with the help of clamps and rubber bands some drops of extra thin cement will do the job to join it all together nicely. The corrugated surfaces are captured well, most of the bigger tubes and wires are moulded.

6 attached images. Click to enlarge.

I prefer the Mig 31 mate, it's the bigger, uglier version of the 25!
The moulding of the plastic looks superb mind. Especially on the wheel wells.

Off to a very nice start! Not familiar with AMK, but the moldings look nice.

The installation of the wheel wells in the lower fuselage shell showed a wide gap towards the sidewall in horizontal direction. I was not ready to accept this and forced a gap free fit of the parts by preliminarily fixing them with a drop of cyano and then applying a fair amount of Tamiya's two component glue to ensure a sustainable connection.
That of course ended up with an according horizontal gap between side wall and wing root.

Also, to my disappointment, in AMK's kit the height of the fuselage sidewall is not sufficient to close up to the wing root leaving another gab, now vertical, of at least a Millimeter.

Adding a shim of plastic card to the wings solved all major gap issues.
Finally, some filler did the job to join together both parts in a reasonable way.

I'm not quite sure whether these mishaps are due to building mistakes of mine or just due to design issues of the kit. In any case, there are a number of build reports in the web that have issues at this spot.

That solved, the fuselage halves and wing roots went together very well. Using super thin cement it's important to make sure that rubber bands don't fit closely to the plastic. To avoid that capillary effect will ruin the surface, I used cloth pegs as a spacer.

PS: the size of this aircraft is huge. Compared with the 31, the Mig-21 on my workbench looks like a toy.

7 attached images. Click to enlarge.

Well Halvar, Martin has fixed it mate.
All looking good from here.

Thanks, George.
Opening some panels is a very good idea.

Let's get on with the build and I let the pictures tell the story this time. The fit of this kit is kind of good. There's nothing you can really complain about, but if you're spoiled by Tamiya's recent releases like I am, you clearly feel room for improvements. Some parts have to be forced in position, most joins will require filling. Mr. Surfacer 500 was used throughout the airframe for this. Different amounts of thinner were added to adjust the required viscosity to the given situation.
The only real issue: the ultimate lower right panel of the fuselage lacks 1-2 Millimeters to close up to the nozzle. It has been filled with a piece of plastic card and carefully sanded and test fitted, see pictures 12-15.

All in all this is fun to build. If you're ready to accept some extra work for bringing it all together, you'll have a great time seeing this extraordinary aircraft growing.

16 attached images. Click to enlarge.