This set is a beautiful pair of brass wing mounted pitot tubes for the Eduard L-39 Albatros kit. As shown in the photos, the kit pitots are very basic straight pieces of sprue with no taper or refinement. The Master Model replacements accurately capture the different diameters of the Albatros’pitot tubes, which range from fairly wide at the wing leading edge, then stepping down two sizes to a nice point at the tip.

As the diameter of the end of the pitots that is inserted into the wing leading edge is almost the thick as the wing, I started with a fairly small drill bit to enlarge the mounting hole, using steadily larger bits as I made the hole large enough for the new parts to slide into the wing. Even then, the fit is tight as the wing is fairly thin. I test fit the new pitots frequently until they just barely fit, each time checking the alignment of my holes to ensure they were level with each other and pointing the same direction forward. The pitots were then attached with super glue and the assembly was set aside to harden.

Once the superglue had set, I proceeded to paint and decal the model. During the painting and decaling process, a second advantage of brass pitots became very obvious as I cannot count the times I heard a metallic twang as I caught something on the pitots, but unlike plastic pitots, the brass ones did not yield or go flying off into the great abyss around my modeling desk.

This set is a great addition to the kit and is a huge improvement over the kit parts. Most highly recommended.

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