The name Macchi is often associated with flying boats and one of the reasons for that is the subject of Windsock Datafile No.162. The Macchi M.7 was one of the most successful biplane flying boat designs to come out of WWI and it enjoyed a phenomenally lengthy and active career from its introduction in 1918 well into the mid-1930s. Serving with other nations in the post-WWI years, examples of this speedy flying boat were also entered into Schneider Trophy races. Noted Italian aero historian and researcher Gregory Alegi presents the full story of this classic Italian Flying boat in this final Datafile for 2013.

MiniArt is a Ukraine company that was established in 2001 and released their first kit in 2003. They are well known for their Diorama series, but the have released many armored vehicles, figure sets and accessory sets over the past several years.

This set comes in an end-opening cardboard box and it contains four sprues of parts molded in a light gray plastic. The molding is clean with no flash, but there are a few minor mold lines that will need to be removed on some of the parts. The attachment points on the parts to the sprue have been well thought out even though some are on the large side. This should make clean up easy. These pieces have a high degree of detail even though some are relatively small.

What comes in the kit is as follows:

Thanks very much to Ross at SAC for doing the hard work for us on this gear. We at IPMS USA sincerely appreciate your contributions for review!

If you have not built the new (2013) release of the BF-109G, may I recommend you try one. The detail is great, fit as well, and the engineering shows much concern for the modeler. This is not the original 1967-vintage model many of us remember.

One weak area of the kit is the landing gear; Revell DE’s plastic is a bit softer than other companies, and this contributes to the lower cost but also means things like landing gear can bow or break over time. In the case of this model, the gear is also made up of three main parts, cemented together. It makes the fidelity to life that much better, but at the same time can contribute to some difficulty in assembly. It’s also a failure point.