Here’s another nifty little “add on” or “fix-it” for your 1/144th Spitfire. The envelope contains 18 main wheels for Spitfires. I had to look closely, but there are 3 different types of tires in the envelope. There are 6 with no tread, 6 with a tread that runs around the tire, and 6 with a diamond tread. When I said I looked closely, I had to use the headband magnifier to see the tread. But they are there.

As far as using these wheels, they’re slightly better in quality than the wheels in the newer Spitfire kits such as Eduard or Mark 1 so you may want to replace the kit items. But if you’re looking at one of the “older” kits (Crown/Revell/Academy), the Brengun wheels are far superior. And then there’s another need for wheels. The wheels are sometimes knocked off the landing gear, or they just get lost. These are the wheels you need.

Installing the wheels is pretty simple, depending on which kit you’re working with. My review began with putting the wheels on a Mark 1 Models 1/144 Spitfire 14. I had finished the model to the point where I had done all the painting and put all the decals on, and I was ready to install the horizontal stabilizers and the landing gear when the model disappeared. I had done the decals on the kitchen table, and I think I may have left it there to let the decals dry. I kind of suspect the cleaning lady grabbed a bunch of stuff off the table and threw it out. So, I went to Plan C. I got an older Spitfire off the shelf and improved the landing gear and wheels a lot.

Installation

Doing the wheels isn’t difficult if you have any experience with resin. I picked two of the wheels with the diamond tread and painted the tires with Tamiya flat black. I then cut the wheels off the sprue, cleaned up the outer edge of the tires, finished the black, and painted the hubs using Tamiya silver.

The Crown landing gear uses a hole that goes completely through the tire to mount on the landing gear leg. This made it pretty easy to get the tires off. The gear legs have fairly heavy pegs to mount the wheels, and the Brengun tires would have looked really funny. I had to drill holes in the “back” of the wheels to mount them. I also had to cut off some of the mounting peg to allow the wheels to sit near enough to the gear leg. Once the gear legs were modified and the holes drilled, I used a quick drop of gel-type CA to put the resin wheels on the plastic legs. This worked fine.

I got a nice looking set of wheels on my old Spitfire. Just wish I could find the newer kit.

Evaluation

Recommended: These are very useful detail parts. They’ve got a low level of difficulty, and you can get the type of tire actually used on the model of Spitfire you’re building.

Thanks to Hauler/Brengun for the review item. And thanks to IPMS USA for letting me use them.