Recently, Airfix has upped its game with the release of several 1/72 scale aircraft kits with new tooling and featuring excellent detail. One such kit is their Hawker Typhoon Mk Ib. Despite Airfix’s excellent out-of-box detail, aftermarket detail manufacturers have tossed their hats into the ring to make an excellent kit even better.

Among them is Aires -- bringing their improved horizontal stabilizers and elevators. Comparing fairly closely to the kit parts, the Aires version offers some slight differences in surface detail and panel location, as well as posable elevators.

Aires’ mold quality and fidelity of detail is exceptional, and the positionable elevators make a subtle contribution to improving this legendary 1/72 RAF tank killer. Highly recommended for the braille scale modeler wanting to really trick out his Typhoon Ib.

Thanks to Aires for the sample parts and to IPMS/USA for the opportunity to review.

This set is designed for Airfix’s newer molding of the later marks of the Spitfire. It consists of 5 white metal parts: 2 main gear struts, 2 main gear doors and a tailwheel. As always, the parts are designed to be drop-in replacements for the kit parts, however, where the kit has the main gear struts and doors molded together, SAC has split each into two pieces, which adds extra depth and definition to the main gear. At first look, I thought the casting blocks had been left on the struts as there is a rectangular piece at the top of each strut, but fortunately before I trimmed them off, I realized that these pieces are part of the struts and actually slot into the square mounting holes in each wheel well, establishing the correct angle both front to back and left to right. The tailwheel is also nicely molded and paints up very nicely.

Kit Made for: Academy, Tamiya or Dragon Wirbelwind or any Flak 38 using the L/65 four barrel set up.

The Flak 38 was 2cm anti-aircraft guns used by various German forces throughout World War II. It was by far the most numerously produced German anti-aircraft artillery piece throughout the war. It was produced in a variety of models, notably the Flakvierling 38 which combined four Flak 38 auto cannons onto a single carriage which the German Heer put into their Wirbelwinds anti-aircraft AFV.

Master’s set comes with four complete barrels including turned brass barrels and flash suppressors as separate parts, so eight parts in total. From what I have read, these are the 15th set of aftermarket barrels for the Flak 38. There are at least three kits of Wirbelwinds (Academy, Tamiya and Dragon) and three of the trailer mounted Flak 38 (Dragon, Tamiya and Bronco) that this set of four barrels will work with.