Eduard has graciously provided the IPMS Reviewer Corps with their new Limited Edition dual combo kit: Wilde Sau, Episode Three: Until the Fall of the Empire. Featuring the Fw 190A-8 and Fw 190D-9 kits in 1/48th scale.

This is Part 2 of this kit review, and it will focus on the Fw 190A-8 airplane build.

Part 1 of this review looked at the box contents.

In the Box

For the Fw 190A-8 kit, the first half of the instructions are dedicated to its assembly. It starts in the cockpit where Eduard provides smooth panel parts to allow the PE details to be glued directly to the plastic without having to first remove & sand away the raised detail. But there are options to use decals to overlay on top of the molded panels or you can paint it by hand.

Once the cockpit is finished it can be installed into the fuselage halves along with the engine front plate.

Eduard has graciously provided the IPMS Reviewer Corps with their new Limited Edition dual combo kit: Wilde Sau, Episode Three: Until the Fall of the Empire. Featuring the Fw 190A-8 and Fw 190D-9 kits in 1/48th scale.

In the Box

This is a typical Eduard top-open box with beautiful artwork. Inside are parts for a Fw 190A-8 and a Fw 190D-9 WWII German airplane. Also included are photo-etched frets for each plane, along with two sets of resin wheels and masking sets for the wheels and canopies.

The instruction booklet has 32 pages with easy-to-follow steps and well-detailed illustrations.

Decals are on one large sheet for both planes, along with a separate stencil decal sheet for each plane. Decals are the kind where you can lift off the carrier film after letting it dry overnight.

The provided decal markings are as follows:

Jaws is one of the most iconic movies ever and started the summer blockbuster trend. I remember watching it in the theater with my mom 50 years ago. Besides the actors and Bruce the shark, one of the iconic things in the movie is the Orca, Quint’s boat. There were actually two of these. The first was an actual functioning boat bought by production designer Joe Alves and was a lobster boat called the Warlock. It was heavily modified and painted to become the Orca. The second Orca was a sinking version used for the final scene in the movie. Enough history, Agora Models has issued a 1/16^th scale version of the Orca as a 50^th anniversary version. Agora uses a business model where you can buy the entire kit, a Collectors Edition which comes with extras or you can buy them monthly over 1 or 2 years period.

When the reviewer corps received Squadrons B-24J “Dragon and His Tail” kit, I said heck yeah, I’ll do it. By the way, I actually used my training and worked a bunch of sheet metal and other stuff on a B-24 over the years when I was the MX rep for a Museum; Specifically, the Willow run Ford-built “J” model Serial Number 44-48781that was, until recently, at Barksdale AFB and is now at Savannah. I also have Bert Kinsey and Rock Roszak’s B-24 Liberator collaboration with Detail and Scale sitting next to me as I write this.

ICM has been producing a series of high-quality twin-engine bombers on a 1/48 scale, like the Ju-88, He-111, Ki-21, Beaufort, just to name a few. Now the Handley Page HP.52 “Hampden” has joined the club!

This boxing is for the Hampden TB.Mk.1 (TB stands for Torpedo Bomber) and has markings for 4 different Hampden airframes, likely covering all the different camouflage schemes used by the Torpedo Bomber variant of the Hampden.

The kit arrives in a sturdy white box (no markings in the box) with a separate lid providing the cover art and details of what is inside the white box. There is a total of 12 sprues with 301 parts, plus a decal sheet and an instruction book which also provides you with mask templates for the complex nose, canopy and defensive gun turrets.