Eduard’s new SUPERFABRIC (the name alone conjures thoughts of Wile. E. Coyote, Super Genius in my mind…) is a new line of seat belts from the ubiquitous aftermarket manufacturer. This latest evolution of scale aircraft seat belts is different from the company’s prior iterations, in that there are no phot-etched parts, and no cutting of materials to use these. They are made from a vinyl like, self adhesive fabric. They are printed in color, and have nice details, consisting of stitch marks and the buckle hardware.

When my set arrived, I eagerly opened the envelope, and gave them the once over, and apart from the above mentioned niceties, something seemed off to my eyes. I double checked the packaging and instructions, and they claimed the appropriate scale is 1/48. I checked again. If these are truly in 1/48, then Imperial Japanese Navy pilots must have been completely covered by their seat belts! They are very much too large.

To verify this, I checked another Eduard set, this time their laser cut IJN belts that I plan on using on an upcoming 1/48 Tamiya A6M3a Type 22 Zerosen. Yup. They are bigger than the laser cut ones. Next, I pulled out one of my 1/32 Tamiya A6M2 Type 21 Zerosen’s. Tamiya provides foil printed belts and photo-etched hardware. Sure enough, these Superfabric belts are very close in size to the 1/32 offerings from Tamiya.

I don’t know how this error came to be, but I cannot believe these are 1/48 scale, unless Eduard is privy to some information that is unknown to me.

All-in-all, these belts are well printed, and other sets I have examined for other aircraft are in the proper scale. Why these IJN ones are off sized, I do not know.

They will look good in your Japanese cockpits, just not in 1/48.