Anyone who has tackled the old Trumpeter MiG-15 or MiG-17 can tell you that these are not models that fall together easily. They are quite challenging and need quite a bit of care to achieve something reasonably accurate. However, since they don’t typically cost an arm and a leg, they can be fun to tackle. Personally, I like the challenge.

Master Model has taken a little of the pain away from creating an accurate model by offering a very nice set of gun barrels and pitot tubes which add enormously to the final finish. I’d already enhanced my model with a bit of scratchbuilding in this area, as the gun tubes on the kit are extremely crude and inaccurate. However, I hadn’t even thought to tackle the pitot tubes as I couldn’t find good photos in my research. In creating this set, Master Model has shown me two things I hadn’t known about this particular beast before. First, I didn’t know that they removed the 37 mm cannon and replaced it with another 23 mm cannon to compensate for the weight of the radar in the nose. Second, I didn’t know that the two pitot tubes were not precisely the same.

Master Model has seen to these details very well, with three 23 mm gun tubes in brass and two pitot tubes, with subtle differences, in aluminum. They also provide a very nice instruction sheet for their placement.

This is a straight-forward, fairly simple part-to-part replacement. Cut off the dismal gun barrels on the kit’s gun shrouds and drill small holes to accept the replacements. The pitot tubes simply go into the holes in the wings and you’re done. I’ve provided pictures of the items installed unpainted so you can really see how they look.

This simple replacement improves the look of these areas immeasurably, and I wish I’d had them sooner. I cannot recommend them highly enough.

My thanks to Master Model and IPMS/USA for the opportunity to review (and utilize) these lovely detail parts.