The UB-32A-24 rocket pod is a Soviet/Russian rocket pod designed for use on helicopters such as the Mi-8, Mi-24 and the Ka-29. The pod carries 32 unguided rockets that can be launched singly or in a salvo.

Eduard’s set provides 4 rocket pods allowing you to load up your Mi-24 Hind. Each rocket pod consists of three parts: a resin pod body, a resin aft shroud and a photo-etch back-plate for the rocket pod. As with any resin set the first step is removing the resin parts from the casting block. The shrouds are easily removed as their connection to the casting block is very thin. The rocket pods themselves are not difficult to remove, but you need to keep an eye on your cut to ensure that the back of the pod is flat. I used an old vacu-form sanding method to square up the ends. I taped a piece of wet & dry sand paper to small piece of glass from an old picture frame and wet sanded the ends of the pods on the glass. By keeping each pod vertical while sanding, I was able to get nice flat ends for the pods.

The instructions and the photos I found online show the pods as being overall dull silver, so I painted the pods and the shrouds Tamiya aluminum. The etch back-plate is painted steel for contrast. I elected to paint the aft ends of the pods Tamiya NATO Black to give the illusion of depth behind the back-plate. This also helps highlight the back-plate which otherwise would disappear against either the grey resin of the pod or the silver of the rest of the pod.

The instructions tell you to glue the back-plate inside of the aft shroud and then glue the shroud onto the rocket pod. As there are no locating lugs or lips inside the shrouds, I instead glued the back-plates to the back of the missile pods using a gel-type superglue, which allowed me time to make sure the back-plate was oriented correctly (the little notch is centered at the top). I then slid the shroud on over this assembly and glued it on. I really like the end result as the black paint behind the back-plate shows off the detail in the photo-etch.

After a quick coat of future, decaling commenced and ended very shortly thereafter as there are only two decals per pod. Be sure that you put them on correctly as they are handed. Once the decals had dried, I sprayed the pods with a flat coat to seal them and applied thin black wash to highlight the rivet details on the pods and the missiles and missile tubes at the front of the pod.

The cast detail on the pods is really good. I assembled one of UB-32 pods from a Hasegawa Hind from my stash and as you can see from the attached photos, the Eduard pods are a vast improvement.

This is a very easy set to use and I would recommend it not only to anyone building a Hind, but also to anyone who has not yet tried Eduard’s Brassin resin parts. Construction is almost foolproof, as long as you take your time and check the alignment of the various parts before committing to gluing them.

Highly recommended for anyone building an armed Russian helicopter! Thank you to Eduard for the review sample and to IPMS/USA for letting me review it.