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.