Last year Airfix released a new kit of the B5N2 Kate, the Japanese Navy’s primary torpedo plane for the early part of World War II. The kit includes an option to depict the aircraft with the wings folded or with them fully spread. This set from Scale Aircraft Conversions includes nine drop-in replacements for the kit wing-folds and landing gear.

The set provides replacements for both inner and outer wing fold plates, the two wing support braces, the main landing gear struts and the tail wheel. As is standard for SAC parts, they are cast in white metal and are intended to add some strength and rigidity in place of the kit parts. All nine pieces are crisply cast, however, as shown in the photographs, one of my inner wing fold plates was slightly deformed when it arrived, but unlike plastic parts, this was easily fixed with a set of smooth jaw pliers. As the kit wings are molded in the spread position, the first thing to do is break out the razor saw and separate the inner and outer wings – fortunately this is a nice straight cut on the Kate, so it is easily done using the provided lines on the insides of the wings. Next is the installation of the fold plates. These can be installed either before or after the upper and lower wing halves are glued together as there is a slight ridge on the inside of the location points that will keep the parts from disappearing into the wings. I glued mine in before joining the halves in order to show how they fit. I prefer the metal fold plates over the kit ones as they allowed me to get a nice solid join with superglue when I attached the folded upper wings.

The main landing gear legs are copies of the kit parts and include the indentations for the pegs on the gear doors. The kit provides weighted wheels which are nicely done and have a half round attachment hole on the back to ensure proper alignment when attached to the struts. The kit struts and the SAC parts also have this half round attachment to ensure proper alignment. Unfortunately, one of my wheels was swallowed up by the floor monster and I had to find replacements from the parts box which do not have the weighted look or the half round attachments, so this attachment point was cut off and the wheels superglued to the struts. I used the SAC tail wheel to add some strength to it and it was a drop in fit.

When the Kate’s wings are folded, there are support braces between the wings and the fuselage to keep the wings in place and to prevent them impacting on the canopy (there is not much clearance under the lowest wingtip). Be sure to drill out the four locating holes on the fuselage (2 each side) before assembling the fuselage if you intend to fold the wings. I used a #66 drill to drill out the holes and the result was a nice tight fit. I normally prefer to stick with the plastic kit parts on things as thin as the support braces as the white metal can easily be bent or deformed, however, this is actually an advantage in this situation as unless your holes are perfectly placed and at the right angle, you will need to bend the supports either inboard or outboard so that they fit into the holes on the upper surfaces of the outer wings. This was much easier with the white metal parts than the plastic kit parts as the new Airfix plastic can be a bit brittle.

The kit instructions tell you to paint the support braces silver, which I did, but next time I will probably go with a brighter color such as red or yellow to make them stand out as they are things that the deck crew would want to be able to locate easily, so making them standout color-wise is likely to have been done.

This is a nice set and has several advantages over the kit parts – recommended.

Thank you to SAC for the review sample and to IPMS-USA for letting me review it.