Fabric Seat Harness for Spitfire Mk 1

Published on
August 3, 2015
Review Author(s)
Scale
1/48
MSRP
$13.00
Product / Stock #
49078
Base Kit
Airfix
Company: Eduard - Website: Visit Site
Provided by: Eduard - Website: Visit Site
Seatbelts

Thanks to Eduard for providing more of their excellent aftermarket parts for IPMS USA to review, and to IPMS leadership for sending it my way.

This harness set is takes advantage of one of the new technology opportunities provided by our ever-expanding aftermarket companies… micro fabric.

The harness appears to be laser cut on material with a white paper backing. Detail is there; in this scale, it was hard to see sometimes, but more on that anon…

I followed the instructions on the back of the sheet, which have you cut out the harness, ball them up and then remove the backing. I did this on the shoulder harness, and this is where I was challenged (and ultimately failed). The material took on a permanent curl and would not lay out so I could thread buckles. I used micro tweezers, and was extremely careful, but even then only succeeded in getting one buckle on one side of one belt… after 1 ½ hours of trying, with a couple of breaks in between.

Honestly, I tried. In the end the spaghetti-like shoulder harness was stretched, and I was frustrated. Brett Green of Hyperscale fame and others have had success with these and spoke highly of their realism. I was obviously the problem.

Setting the shoulder harness aside, I tried a lap belt. This time, I did not ball up the fabric. I was able to get one belt to obey my prodding, but had similar problems in threading buckles. The result is in the second photograph; I used superglue as recommended.

End game: I did not use these on the Spitfire kit; the harness was hopelessly mangled by me, and I resorted to the interior set’s metal harness which I had much better success with.

I can’t fault the product, it’s the reviewer. I still give full marks to Eduard for this set; others have had great success, and I say press on and buy and try; it’s a challenge past my abilities, so once again THANK YOU to Eduard and IPMS USA for this review opportunity!

Comments

Add new comment

All comments are moderated to prevent spam


This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.