Thank you to the Eduard Company for sending this detail set for review, it is always a pleasure to see what Eduard’s new products bring to the scale modeling world. Thank you also to the IPMS Reviewer Corps staff members who do the hard work in getting us modeling products to review, the reviews posted, and the news spread to the world.

The photoetch frets arrived in excellent shape in a sealed plastic package with the distinctive Eduard knight logo. One cockpit fret is 2.75 x 1.6 inches on polished metal with color-etched laminated details, and the other fret is 3.1 x 2.75 inches on polished brass. Side consoles and instrument panel parts are provided for either a F2H-2 or F2H-2P. Internal and external details for one model are on these two frets. I particularly appreciate having three clear HUD pieces included on the film part. Only one is required, but I need two of them to complete the set. You can speculate why! I worked up the fighter version for this review.

Continuing our appreciation from IPMS USA goes to Eduard for their having once again provided a sample copy of a long-awaited product, the SNIPER Targeting Pod, and the usual wave of thanks to the IPMS USA leadership for ensuring I received it!

This set contains 7 parts for one SNIPER pod: the resin main body, the forward seeker head, three clear windows for the seeker, a mount with sway braces for the pod, the aft mounting brace and interface for later pods, a PE fret with details such as seeker eye vents, and aft plates, and small decal sheet.

Detail on this set is stunning; you can show the pod head stowed or in operation, and every rivet, joint, screw and bolt is on the pod.

The Kits

The molds for these kits were originally produced by Impact in the early 60s as part of a series of British fighters that included the Bristol Bulldog, Fairey Flycatcher, Hawker Fury and the Gloster Gladiator. The molds have changed hands from Impact through Lifelike, Pyro and Lindberg and now are the property of Lindberg/Round 2. This double kit is a reissue by Lindberg Round 2 with improved instructions, one additional decal option per plane and two 36" lengths of rigging wire (not included in any of the previous issues).

Included in the box are:

Guns and pitot probes on most plastic model aircraft leave a lot to be desired. There is often a mold seam down the center of the guns or pitot probe. Another set of problems are that the same parts, once cleaned up, are usually oval shaped in diameter, and the guns do not have that proper hollowed look of a real gun barrel. In some scales, such as 1/72, it would be difficult if not impossible to drill out these plastic gun barrels and pitot tubes.

Master Model has solved this problem with an aftermarket kit for the A-1 Skyraider. This kit consists of thirteen metal parts which will allow for two different gun barrel configurations, and a pitot probe to replace the kit’s pitot probe. Each gun barrel is realistically hollow on the inside, with the thickness of the barrel in scale with the model. Master Model’s parts are not unique to a specific A-1 kit, but are compatible with any 1/72 scale A-1 Skyraider kit, no matter which variant it is.

The Mi-24 Hind is one of the meanest attack helicopters on the battlefield. It is huge, ugly and spectacularly brutish. The Hind-D/E had a 12.7 YakB machine gun mounted in a turret under the nose. This gun was capable of carrying 1,470 rounds of 12.7mm ammunition and firing at a rate of 4,500 rounds a minute. This gun is a whole lot of whoop ass to go along with its brutish looks.

Master Model has started to release some helicopter armament systems in their turned metal barrel range. The third in the 1/35^th scale series is the gun and DUAS Probe for the Mi-24D/E.