The Kit

This kit contains the rear fuselage section and outer wing sections of a Horsa glider. It does NOT contain the entire aircraft. When I saw the size of the box, I imagined a complicated kit with a zillion parts. Nothing could be further from the truth. The kit contains 11 sprues, but fewer than 60 parts and assembly is completed in six steps. It includes a clear sprue for a window in the bottom of the fuselage, and a PE fret with two parts. The PE parts are optional and may be used to replace the plastic parts for brackets on the foremost bulkhead. All of the control surfaces including dive brakes are separate and moveable. There are some ejection pin marks on the inside of the flaps, so if you choose to display the kit with the flaps down, you’ll need to fill them. Otherwise, the kit has no issues.

Trumpeter has issued two versions of their 1/32 A-6 Intruder which was on many people's most-wanted list. While the kit is expensive, it is well done, well detailed and builds into a great replica. Of course that doesn’t mean there isn't some room for improvement. While the aftermarket has been slow coming, Eduard has issued sets for the A-6E TRAM version to spice up several areas of the kit as well as a canopy masking set.

This is a mask set for the Kinetic Su-33 Kit. This set helps save time masking the canopy and wheels by providing all you need with pre-cut masks.

In the packet is:

• 1 precut masking sheet
• 1 instruction sheet

The masks are for the front windscreen, main canopy and the wheel hubs

Summary

This is very good and time saving when it comes to masking, which is perfect for this kit and really helps.

Thanks go to Eduard for providing this set to review and IPMS USA for allowing me to review it for them.

For those unfamiliar with carrier aviation, when an aircraft is not actively in use, it is secured to the deck using a come-along device between attachment points on the aircraft and tie downs on the deck. The tie downs are dished out areas on the deck (flight deck and hangar bay) with a welded on set of metal rods that form a star shape. I became most familiar with a flight deck tie down during my shellback initiation as I blew the water out of one of the tie downs as I awaited the next station. When the flight deck or hangar bay has a fresh coat of non-skid applied, the tie downs are masked off. Depending on the era of the carrier you are modeling, you will find tie downs painted either white or a dark gray (I prefer Model Master Engine Gray to represent this).

Developed as a replacement for the Maschinengewehr 08, the MG-14 Parabellum was a machine gun used on WWI German aircraft that was capable of firing 700 rounds per minute of its deadly 7.92 mm ammunition. Although Anthony Fokker used this model gun in the development of the synchronizing gear for his aircraft, the gun was typically used in the flexible mounts of reconnaissance aircraft, bombers, and Zeppelins. The lighter weight of the gun (as compared to the MG-08), high rate of fire, and reduction in the size of the ammunition belt, set the MG-14 apart as a weapon of choice.