Eduard continues its recent trend of providing realistic seat belts for a wide variety of aircraft. This set is advertised as providing seat belts for Imperial Japanese Army Air Force aircraft from World War II and boy does it!

The set provides two types of seat belts for Nakajima aircraft, one leather and the other cloth, and a different type for Kawaski aircraft. There enough sets to make 9 sets of Kawaski belts, 9 sets of leather Nakajima belts and 13 sets of cloth Nakajima belts! The belts are in full color and assembly is easy as all you have to do is glue the part representing the leather back pad behind the buckle on the left belt and then you are ready to install the belts.

Initial Impressions

With the popularity of the MENG F-102 kit, it was a given that a 106 would be coming down the pike soon. When it was announced, there was a lot of fanfare and anticipation in the new offering. Being a fan of the century series, it was also natural that I would pick one up to see what it offered. The 102 was far from a “perfect” build for me and I was hoping that MENG learned their lessons from the past and integrated improvements into the “six”.

Upon inspecting the sprues I found a lot of improvements over the previous 102 offering. Cockpits had a much greater detail (molded in seatbelts, etc.) as well as parts to build both types of panel and ejection seats. A PE fret was added with some detail items, and a crew ladder. The radome was now an option, as the radar and front maintenance panels could be displayed open, providing a great static display. These items were well-cast with little flash.

Big sprue attachment points and soft plastic are not a good combination for small parts. The KP/Smer kits have just his problem. They are great kits and the most accurate Su-25K available, but there are some things that you can do better.

Enter Quickboost. This two-piece resin upgrade is for the cockpit. Perfectly cast in light grey resin this set has a control lever and pedals. The detail that is on the control lever alone is beautiful. Every switch is there and they are all perfectly cast. The pedals are beautifully done on the control yoke. The pedals are so nice that they have the anti-slid surface. A good paint and dry brush bring out all the detail. These parts are simple replacement for the kit parts.

Easy to remove parts with far superior detail and an inexpensive price tag makes this another winner from Quickboost.

Highly recommended

Thanks to Ross at SAC for sending us improved metal landing gear for the massive Boeing 777, and thanks also to IPMS USA leadership for sending it to me….

This is ‘du rigeur’ SAC white metal upgrade to the basic kit plastic! The set consists of 9 parts: Two main struts, two strut retraction cylinders, the nose gear, retraction arm, and a drag brace, and two centering and leveling cylinder assemblies for the main trucks.

The landing gear on the 777 is a monster in real life; it has six wheel/tire assemblies on each wing, and is quite a piece of kit for supporting this highly-successful airliner and cargo hauler. On the kit, it makes sense to have similar strength. For 1/144 scale, it’s a big model. Zvezda’s plastic is pretty strong, but the SAC gear makes it better…

Often, the wheels in modern jet kits are either too thin or too thick to be accurate representations of the real thing. Other times they just lack detail or just do not look right and we have to look to the aftermarket for replacements.

This set from RES-IM provides a very nicely molded set of tires for the MiG-21 Fishbed. The set does not state whether or not it is for early or late versions of the MiG-21 and I have not dug out my Aerofax book on the MiG-21 to see if there are any differences, so I don’t know for sure, but I can say they are a big improvement over the kit tires of my Fujimi MiG-21R kit tires as shown in the photos. The set consists of two main wheels and one nose wheel. The tires are crisply molded with outstanding hub detail that really pops out with paint a wash.