Eduard continues its recent trend of providing realistic seat belts for a wide variety of aircraft. This set is advertised as providing seat belts for Imperial Japanese Army Air Force aircraft from World War II and boy does it!

The set provides two types of seat belts for Nakajima aircraft, one leather and the other cloth, and a different type for Kawaski aircraft. There enough sets to make 9 sets of Kawaski belts, 9 sets of leather Nakajima belts and 13 sets of cloth Nakajima belts! The belts are in full color and assembly is easy as all you have to do is glue the part representing the leather back pad behind the buckle on the left belt and then you are ready to install the belts.

Recently I was given the opportunity by IPMS USA to review Eduard’s STEEL Belt line for the new 1/32 Revell Me262B-1 kit. I waited and waited for the new 1/32 Revell Me262B-1 to be released in the States and that day has not come yet so I bought one from Germany. One of the first things to notice with this product is the excellent presentation of the packaging with the sealed flap on the back of package to allow for easy access to parts.

Upon removal of the photoetch from the package you will notice the great level of detail on the pre-painted belts which include a little bit of weathering. These belts are only 0.04 mm thick and are very easy to position on the seat and they hold their shape well.

You can apply these to the seats using a spot of superglue and you will have a great representation of the Me262 belts and harnesses.

THANK YOU to our friends and suppliers at Aires/Quickboost for another improvement set, in this case for the Trumpeter A-37 Dragonfly. And thanks also to the reviewer corps leaders for making them available for my review.

This set takes the kit components and improves them by directly replacing the kit parts with fine, pressure-molded resin parts. These are very thin and fragile! Included are six antennas; two VHF blades, two Glideslope blades, one UHF blade, and one Omnidirectional antenna blister.

Remove the parts from their pour stub, and superglue in place. These fit in place of the kit items, no additional sanding or kit plastic removal required. Quick and improved kit appearance with scale size and thickness.

The kit parts are good; the Aires parts are better. Improved, more “scale” detail, more finesse on the antennas, and they are correctly a bit smaller in size. The parts also have “sharper” molding on the parts overall.

Eduard has released a new mold of the Bf-109F-4, perhaps the most elegant and streamlined of all the 109s.

In the Profipack package you get 5 sprues (including a clear one), a color photo-etch fret, two decal sheets for 5 markings (all Luftwaffe) and a mask set for the canopy and the tail wheel. No flash anywhere and very sharp, recessed panel lines are a signature of those sprues.

While you get 5 sprues, you also get plenty of unused (spare) parts, like 3 different propellers, different wheels, some weapons, different rudders, air intakes, oil coolers and even extra canopies, so you should be able to get some “extras” for other 109s in your collection.

As expected, construction starts with the cockpit and it is a very straightforward and well-designed subcomponent. You make it look even better by adding photoetch belts plus a provided fuel line in clear plastic, which when masked and painted looks outstanding.

Tamiya has released a “Panel Line Accent” line with 4 colors: Black, Brown, Gray and Dark Brown. They are an enamel-based wash, so it is smelly and it could attack bare plastic, so test it on a scrap piece (a runner or extra part) first.

The panel line accent is packaged in the same kind of bottle than the Tamiya Glue down to the small and thin applicator brush, which comes in very handy when applying it to a recessed panel line.

In this review I applied 3 “spots” of panel accent line to an unpainted piece (leftover) from and Eduard model and it did not damage that plastic. Not only that, but 3 applications were enough to see all the panel lines completely covered. The wash just flows on its own along the whole panel line.