Master Model produces beautiful little brass parts for aircraft. Their particular thing is those easily broken and lost parts, pitot tubes and wing guns. I also recently did a review on their gun barrels for the 1/144 Ju-87G Stuka, another set of easily broken parts.

The instructions are pretty basic, so you need to have some modeling experience to figure out what to do. On the other hand, once you’ve done one of these, it becomes pretty clear what the instructions want you to do.

Assembly

I started with Minicraft Spitfire Vc which has been on my shelf for a while. I began by cutting off the kit supplied guns with a sprue cutter. Master makes their guns a little longer so there’s a solid mating surface between the kit wing and the cannon barrel.

After cutting off the kit part, I used a narrow sanding stick to flatten the leading edge to give me a clean shot at drilling the hole I needed to insert the cannon barrel. I got a surprise here. I have done the cannons on two Eduard Spitfire IXs, and the drilling was tough but possible. I drilled a .25 mm hole in the wing as a pilot hole, there wasn’t enough wing to drill the larger (.8mm) hole called for in the instructions. The Minicraft wing is thinner. I wound up with two troughs in the wings. The drill went through the top and bottom surfaces of the wing.

I glued the cannon in with gel-type CA. I then filled the remainder of the troughs with Mr. Surfacer 1000. After the filler set up, I ran a Mr. Thinner soaked Q-Tip over the area, which removed the excess Surfacer. No sanding was required.

Painting

I used a fine brush with Model Master paints to cover the Mr. Surfacer and the guns.

Overall Evaluation

The tough part of this project was drilling out the wings. And with the thinner wing, it was actually easier than others. Getting the guns to align wasn’t much of a problem, and they’re certainly more accurate looking and far stronger than the kit items.

I highly recommend this item for any 1/144 Spitfire b wing kit.

Many thanks to Master Model for the review item, and to IPMS USA for allowing me to review it.