When the Airfix Bristol Blenheim Mk I showed up on the kits available for review, I quickly put my name in the hat for it. I had seen the results of a 1/48 scale kit and was eager to try my hand and add to my RAF Battle of Britain collection.

A few paragraphs of history: The Bristol Blenheim was a British light bomber aircraft designed and built by the Bristol Aeroplane Company that was used extensively in the early days of the Second World War.

It was adapted as an interim long-range and night fighter, pending the availability of the Beaufighter. It was one of the first British aircraft to have all-metal stressed-skin construction, to utilize retractable landing gear, flaps, a powered gun turret and variable pitch propellers. A Canadian-built variant named the Bolingbroke was used as an anti-submarine and training aircraft.

This photo-etch detail set provides a higher level of detail for the relatively recent release of the Airfix A-4B kit. It contains two frets of parts. The smaller of the two is self-adhesive with some of the parts pre-painted. These parts are meant largely for the cockpit and ejection seat. The larger fret is meant to be used largely on the airframe and isn’t self-adhesive. The detail on all of the parts is crisp, as we’ve come to expect from Eduard.

Starting with the cockpit, I discovered that the set’s self-adhesive parts had run out of stickum. When I received the set, it wasn’t newly issued, so I’m assuming the adhesive has a shelf life which had run its course in the interim between IPMS receiving the set and my getting it for review. Smaller parts, such as the rudder pedals and seat belts, just fell off the backing paper when they were cut from the fret, their adhesive gone altogether.

In recent months Eduard Models has been releasing some very useful tools for the modeler, like this series of templates. I have previously reviewed three other sets in the range: http://web.ipmsusa3.org/content/shapes-templates

This first set reviewed in this article is “Ovals and Oblong,” part number 00031, with a total of 25 shapes. There are four subsets of shapes: two oval subsets, a teardrop subset, and a circle with a flat edge subset. The last shape is very useful when scribing fuel/oil caps onto airplanes or vehicles.

The next set is “Ovals,” part number 00032, with a whopping 60 oval templates. Their dimension ranges from 1x1.8 mm to 2.8x7.6 mm. You will be hard pressed to claim there was an oval shape you couldn’t find in this template set.

First things first, I want to thank Aires for supplying this Quickboost item for review and IPMS/USA for allowing me to write this review.

The last biplane fighter to enter service with the Royal Air Force was the Gloster Gladiator. Even though it was not a first-line fighter almost from the beginning, it was used in nearly all theaters during World War II. It epitomized the best of the biplane era with an enclosed cockpit, top speed of 257 mph and four .303 Browning machine guns. Two of the guns, with 600 rounds each, were located in the forward fuselage with the barrels protruding between the cylinders of the radial engine. The other two guns, with 400 rounds each, were located just forward of the cockpit, over the wing root leading edges, and they fired between the cylinders via a trough in the fuselage.

Thank you, Quickboost, for furnishing this review sample and thank you, IMPS/USA, for allowing me to do the review.