RES-IM has come out with a pair of resin main wheels for the Hawker Hurricane in 1/72.

They are cast in a medium gray resin with no flash or seam, smooth surface (no thread) and are slightly flattened at the pour stubs.

I have several soft cover books on the Hurricane and I checked all the pictures to look at the main wheel hubs. I found in my unscientific search that the prototype and the very early Mk1 Hurricanes had 5 spoke main hubs. Sometime during the Mk1 production a 4 spoke main wheel emerged and was the standard for quite some time, only the MkXII variants differed in having a 3 spoke main hub. RES-IM resin main wheels are the 5 spoke type so it would be greatly useful for use on the new 1/72 Airfix early Hurricane with fabric wings. I measured the RES-IM wheels at 0.3745” in diameter and after removing the seam off the Airfix main wheels these measured at 0.3835” in diameter not very different at all. The Airfix main wheels have a rectangular hole to accept the main gear, while the RES-IM has a round hole, but being resin it would be easy to take a sharp exacto blade to turn that round hole into a rectangular hole to accept the Airfix main gear.

I would recommend the use of these RES-IM resin wheels for the Airfix kit and even for the older Sword Mk1 fabric wing model kit if you had one. As far as I know these are the only resin 5 spoke wheels around right now in 1/72 scale. I want to thank Resin Improvement and IPMS/USA for giving me the opportunity to write this review.