This book is the first of a series on French aircraft, and follows the excellent format developed by this publisher’s Polish Wings series of books on Polish aircraft. Since Azur produces kit of the Latecoere 298 in both 1/72 and 1/48 scales, this book will serve as a good reference for these aircraft. An 8 ½ x 11” paperback consisting of 80 pages, this book tells the development and service history of the two major French Navy torpedo bombers of the 1930’s. Strangely, the Latecoere 298 is covered before its predecessor, the 290 is described, and to get things into perspective, I began reading about the earlier type, then progressing to its replacement at the beginning of the text, as I wanted to read the story in sequence.
Layout of the Sprues:
- Sprue A - Cruciform base and extension legs
- Sprue A4 – Cruciform base top
- Sprue B – Parts for Travel carriages and bits for Cruciform base
- Sprue C x 2 – Parts for Travel carriages and bits for Cruciform base
- Sprue D – Shield and base parts of the Gun
- Sprue E – Plastic barrel and small parts of the gun
- Sprue WA – Shells and shell casings
- Photo Etch A – Shield
- Photo Etch B – More shield parts and ready round box
- Photo Etch C – Shell base
- Other Parts – Metal Barrel, metal tube, Rubber tires
Steps 1, 2, & 3 – Building of the Cruciform base
Sprues
- A – This sprue contains the barrel, shield, and gun cradle
- B – This sprue contains the ammo and ammo crates
- C x 2 – Tires
- E – This spure contains the tubular ammo cases
- G – This sprue contains parts for the gun, shield, gun cradle and a lot of unused parts from Kit 35045
- H x 2 – This has the wheel and hand wheels
- N – This has the trails and associated bits
- P – Photo Etched parts
This kit is a representation of the rebuild of a captured Soviet Divisional Gun. The anti-tank performance of the F-22 divisional gun was inferior to the 7.5cm PaK40. However, the Germans had captured over 500 of these guns and made use of them.
Quickboost just keeps adding to their line of resin aircraft accessories. The latest addition is for the Hasegawa Ta 154. It is up to their usual standards; molded in grey resin, smooth, seamless and bubble free. One thing of note is that they are really easy to remove from the mold block because of a nice perforation. It only took me a couple of minutes with my saw blade to remove them.
The night exhausts that come in the Hasegawa kit look alright and would make an acceptable model, but the kit parts are 2 pieces, so they have a seam that will need to be fixed. The Quickboost replacements are one-piece, and just look a lot better when along side the kit parts. They are very easy to install, and they just fit right in.
Ever since the days of Waldron Instrument Bezels I’ve wanted to be able to build instrument panels like I saw the pros do. The biggest thing preventing me was the lack of instrument decals. Well those days are over. Airscale has now released a sheet of Luftwaffe instruments designed specifically for fighters. You get a small sheet of approximately 1”x 2” which contains enough instruments to do a couple of instrument panels.
Printed by Fantasy Printshop, every instrument is accurately reproduced with some exquisitely fine range markings and numbers. Airscale recommends cutting out the instruments. I think you can use your Waldron Punch and Die set as well if you are careful.
Also included in the set is a piece of clear acetate to help you replicate the instrument faces on your scratch built panel. You’ll need a punch set to punch out the acetate sheet as there is no ‘cutouts’ for the instruments.