Pavla has come out with a Bomb Bay and Wheel well set for the Hasegawa 1/72 S-3A Viking. When you first look at the Hasegawa kit you realize that the Bomb bay doors are molded in the closed position. This may be okay for the S-3B but the A model carried Torpedoes. After all it was a sub hunter, so who wouldn’t want a bomb bay?

This offering is really a quality set of resin pieces; smooth, seamless and bubble free. The detail is also very nice and doesn’t need any extra work to bring out the detail. Naturally, you will have to cut away those molded closed doors. Yes, once again into the breach, and drag out the hobby knives and saws and other implements of destruction. After I got the doors out of the way, the Pavla Bomb bay just fit right in. The amount of detail is unreal. The wheel wells are vastly superior to the Hasegawa wells and dry brushing will really accentuate the detail. I noticed, in my Airfix kit, there were torpedoes that I can steal to really make this bird look like it means business.

I highly recommend this product if you want a really superior looking model. There was some cutting involved to remove the rather large door area, so I would recommend this to modelers with experience doing these kinds of improvements.

Thanks to Pavla models and IPMS/USA for the chance to do this review.