Quickboost replacement propellers have been around for a few years now, but this is the first chance I have taken to work with one. I have to say I am impressed. This is an ingenious idea, which is very quick and simple – all at a reasonable price. There are other products on the market today which help the modeler to properly align their propeller blades. Quickboost has done something here which accomplishes the same thing, at lower cost.

The La-7 propeller set comes in the typical Quickboost plastic sleeve packaging, and contains several resin parts: The propeller hub, a resin set of propeller blades and “the tool”. The detail set is designed for the Hasegawa or Eduard boxing of the 1/48 WWII Soviet La-7 Fighter.

Cleanup is very easy and accomplished in little time. The extra resin casting plug at the bottom of the propeller hub needs to be cut off and sanded flat. Any good quality razor saw will work, along with a sanding block. Next, the builder then needs to carefully remove the three propeller blades from their casting base. I first broke the two side ‘protector’ risers off and then again – used a razor saw to cut the props from the base. With a sharp X-Acto blade, I trimmed the thin resin flash around the base of each propeller blade. After another quick sanding – all the parts were ready!

The “Tool” that Quickboost includes is a jig that allows the builder to perfectly align the propeller blades into the propeller hub assembly. First one should drill out the hole in the Tool, as there is a casting plug at the bottom of the tool. Rather than cut the plug off the Tool itself, I simply sanded it a little to ensure it was flat and level, then drilled a hole down from the top. Once that was accomplished, I placed the propeller hub on the tool and drilled a hole up into the hub from beneath the jig. This will make assembly of the new resin parts onto the kit much easier when that time comes.

All that is left is to attach the three blades into the hub. I used an ordinary off the shelf superglue here and carefully inserted one blade at a time. Ensuring that each was fully inserted into the hub, and aligned to the Tool shape properly. Since this was my first attempt at this, I didn’t use any accelerant, and let the glue dry on its own. It look a little longer, but it allowed me to ensure that all of the blades were aligned correctly. The alignment jig lets you see that you have the same pitch to each blade – as well as the same length to each blade. Repeat this three times, and that’s it!

When finished you have a more detailed propeller assembly than the one which came with the kit, and all of your propeller blades are aligned to the same angle. I don’t think this could be much simpler if they tried.

Included are some photos of the new resin parts alongside the kit parts so you can compare the two. I borrowed the kit, so it was difficult to get a nice clear image of both the original kit parts and the new resin Quickboost parts without cutting the kit parts off the sprue.

I recommend this to any modeler who wants to add a little more detail to their kit at a reasonable price. Don’t be frightened by using this resin detail set – it really is a snap to use. If you have a little experience using superglue and a razor saw, you will not have any trouble with this nice set.

Thank you to Aires for the review sample and for their continued work in helping bring more detail to our models with the Quickboost line. Thank you to IPMS/USA for the review sample as well.