Platz kits are noted for their delicacy and true-to-scale thickness of parts, and their Focke-Wulf 190D-9 is no exception. Engraved surface detail and excellent fit make the build easy with little need for putty; the gear legs are scale thickness and even the pitot tube is molded pretty much to scale. The offering is typical Platz – two complete kits in the box, with decals and optional parts supplied for three different Reich birds.

The interior is basic, with a seat and an otherwise bare cockpit space.

Two canopies are provided, the low-profile one and the blown type, along with the appropriate interior headrest structure for each.

The small main gear drag braces are handed, with really small pins which fit into the aft sides of the wheel wells – it’d be easy to reverse these parts, so the builder needs to take care here. I drilled out the supercharger intake while it was still on the sprue and then attached it to the fuselage. I notched the centerline rack a little to accept the belly tank hangers a little closer to the fuselage.

The instructions take a little study as they’re mostly in Japanese, with a few omissions which would’ve made it easier for me to do the masking and painting. Upper surface camouflage painting instructions for the version I chose are a little difficult to see where the colors should go, but the reverse side of the Platz box has color three-views showing them much better than the black-and-white drawings on the instruction sheet.

The decals are excellent: white areas are opaque and other colors are overstrikes on top of white, so the colors are true. Stenciling is provided, which is crisp and readable…with a magnifier, anyhow. Some of the stenciling is included on other decals, so starting with the big pieces first will avoid having a double-stencil effect.

The decal sheet also features the Politically-Correct two-piece swastikas, but in addition, a side of the sheet has the Historically Correct ones as well. The wing upper surface decals are pretty extensive, with the insignia, wing walk areas, and stenciling included, along with a pretty big expanse of clear carrier film. I’d thought about slicing them into individual markings and applying them separately so I wouldn’t have to worry about decal silvering, but after trying that (once) with the fin/rudder decal, I chose to take the easier road.

My biggest problem with the kit was its small size and trying to hold tiny parts and cleaning them up. Somewhere in my basement, a tailwheel is waiting for me to find it.

Very nice, precise kit, and…somewhat of a miracle for me, to boot. (I figured if I got the model completed without busting off its pitot tube, it’d be a miracle…heaven knows I bent it enough times during the build, but it never departed the wing.)

Like all other Platz kits I’ve built – highly recommended. Many thanks to Platz and to IPMS/USA for this model and the opportunity to review it…it was a fun build.