The first kits of Eduard’s long awaited line of 1/72 MiG-21’s have now been released and along with them a whole slew of photo-etched and resin accessories. This set provides resin and photo-etch replacement parts for the kit’s exhaust. The set consists of 3 resin parts and 3 photo-etch parts. The resin parts replace the aft turbine blades, the exhaust tube and the exhaust nozzle while the photo-etch parts make up the afterburner assembly. The exhaust tube depicts the corrugated interior of the tube adjacent to the afterburner assembly and the smooth tube leading to the nozzle.

Separating the exhaust tube and the nozzle from their pour stubs was easily accomplished as the cut points are very clear and the resin is fairly thin. Removing the aft turbine blade part from its pour stub was more time consuming as the plug is pretty substantial. You also want to keep the cut straight and clean as this part is supposed to slide in between the raised ridges inside the after part of the kit. More about this later.

The instructions state that interior of the entire assembly is to be painted bright or emerald green; however, the kit instructions tell you to paint the turbine blades and the center spike where the afterburner assembly attaches a steel color. I elected to follow the kit instructions as painting turbine blades green just seemed wrong. In reality it really does not matter as once you have attached the afterburner assembly and the exhaust tube, the turbine blades cannot be seen. Since I wanted to show an operational aircraft, I did airbrush some flat black onto the afterburner assemble and down the exhaust tube before gluing them together with superglue.

The nozzle itself is to be painted stainless steel with the outside edge in a dark iron. It is supposed to slot right into the aft end of the exhaust tube and there is raised pin on the nozzle part to fit into a slot inside of the exhaust tube, at least in theory that is. No matter how I tried, I was not able to get the nozzle to mount flush on the end of the exhaust tube, so I ended up taking a sanding stick to the part of the nozzle that is supposed to slide into the tube and beveling the edge until I was able to get the nozzle into the tube and seated.

I then offered up the completed assembly to the kit fuselage, inserted the raised ring around the turbine blades between the two raised ridges inside the aft fuselage. I then offered up the other fuselage half and discovered that there was a gap either on the top or the bottom when I tried to close the fuselage halves, indicating that the raised ring was too wide or too tall for the kit. I again broke out the sanding stick and sanded down the outside edges of the raised ring until I was able to close the fuselage around it. I then test fit part A16, the exhaust fairing, and discovered that I had misassembled something as there was a 1/8 to ¼ inch gap between the fairing and the end of the fuselage! As I did not want to damage the delicate nozzle casting, I decided to try mounting the exhaust assembly just in front of the forward most raised ring inside the fuselage. It worked as by doing so, I had eliminated the gap between the aft fuselage and the nozzle fairing. In looking at my completed assembly and Eduard’s diagram on the instructions, I think I needed to do a bit more sanding to close the gap between the exhaust tube and the nozzle as the instructions show more of a flush fit than I achieved.

I really like the idea of replacing the kit’s two part exhaust tube with a single resin part as this eliminates any concerns about a seam inside the exhaust tube, but next time I will do a bit more experimenting with the fit to see if I can figure out why my first attempt did not fit where it was supposed to.

Even with my mistakes, this is a really nice set and adds some crisp detail the aft end of your MiG-21. Highly recommended.

Thank you to Eduard for the review sample and to IPMS-USA for letting me try it out.