Merit quietly issued a 1/35 X-craft submarine and once I got my hands on it, I was impressed with both the molding and size of the kit. Still, there was some room for add-ons and improvements and Eduard has issued a photoetch sheet to help address some of the issues.

Eduard’s sheet is composed of a single sheet with 30 superb parts. The sheet addresses the hatches on the top of the ship by replacing 6 individual parts and adding detail and texture. A little removal of the hinges and these go on smoothly. There are slight folds on four of the parts but this is easy to accomplish with a new #11 blade.

Next, the kit propeller is undersized and Eduard uses the kit hub but has you wrap three individual blades around a dowel and add them to the hub. This takes a little patience but the result is a larger and more accurate prop.

Applications

Airscale, as usual is a leader in making cockpit enhancing products and this is a new product to their line. Finally the modern cockpit has been addressed with these decals allowing a modeler to get just the right look of electronic flight displays and round instruments. Included on the electronic displays are the bezel buttons surrounding the bezel. The modelers would have to remove any raised buttons if retaining this portion or simply cut the display portion out and paint the buttons.

There is a little surprise and a real bonus in this set, a legend giving the name of each instrument type. Usually if you look close enough you can guess here but this is taken care of with this nice feature.

Master Models once again provides IPMS USA with examples of machine-shop excellence… We are extremely thankful to Piotr for providing examples of his work to review.

As you can see by the product photographs, these .50 caliber browning machine gun barrels are exquisite works of art. Designed to fit one of the two 1/32 Lighting models currently available, this nine-part set provides four different length .50 caliber barrels, and one 20MM cannon barrel; all have flash hiders integrally-machined in place, and represent the armament as used on P-38M night-fighter variants of the Lightning. Unlike set 086, this one does not have separate cooling jackets or barrels, so it is a simple finish and install set to replace the kit items. I do not have a night fighter conversion for the 1/32 kit, so this set was not installed. However, attached is a great picture of the actual item and how it would look on the real item…