Master Model is a Polish company. The owner is Piotr Czerkasow who is a mechanical engineer by trade. Piotr is also a scale modeler. Master model has a broad range of accessories for aircraft, military vehicles, and ships in several of the popular scales. In addition, they also offer a blackening agent until their Tools and Supplies tab.

Background

The Dornier Do 335 Pfeil ("Arrow") was a World War II heavy fighter built by the Dornier company. The two-seater trainer version was called Ameisenbär ("anteater"). The Pfeil's performance was much better than other twin-engine designs due to its unique push-pull configuration and the lower aerodynamic drag of the in-line alignment of the two engines. It was Germany's fastest piston-engined aircraft of World War II. The Luftwaffe was desperate to get the design into operational use, but delays in engine deliveries meant that only a handful was delivered before the war ended.

A recent addition to the IPMS Review Corps suppliers is Mikro-Mir, whose kits remind me of what I am used to seeing with limited production manufacturers. This is not a negative comment, but more of a heads up that some building experience is required to end up with a nice finished model at the end of construction. The overall assembly of this kit was relatively easy with 23 plastic parts and 11 photoetched parts included. Modelers with some experience will enjoy this kit, which represents a one-off design that was the fastest submarine produced to date.

Airfix has released a new-mold Ju-87B-2/R-2. Typical the recent releases of Airfix, you get state-of-the-art surface detail and fit, together with superb engineering that makes the construction of this model a very enjoyable experience.

Like with most airplane models, construction starts with the cockpit. Being a two-seater, there is plenty of detail on it, including a radio, pilot and gunner seat, sidewall detail, extra ammo for the gunner, etc. Take your time and do some detailed painting, it will pay off later. Note that the instrument panel is provided as a decal (which looks very good) and no seatbelts are provided. I scratch-built the seatbelts being depicted in this model.

Also note that there are a few ejection pin marks in the cockpit floor area, near the gunner seat that could be visible. I choose to fill them out. Also, there are a few ejector pins on the fuselage inner sides, but are not visible, as the sidewall detail will cover them.

The first kits of Eduard’s long awaited line of 1/72 MiG-21’s have now been released and along with them a whole slew of photo-etched and resin accessories. This set provides resin and photo-etch replacement parts for the kit’s exhaust. The set consists of 3 resin parts and 3 photo-etch parts. The resin parts replace the aft turbine blades, the exhaust tube and the exhaust nozzle while the photo-etch parts make up the afterburner assembly. The exhaust tube depicts the corrugated interior of the tube adjacent to the afterburner assembly and the smooth tube leading to the nozzle.

New (to me) from Eagle Editions’ “EagleCal” line is this 1/48 scale sheet of decals for the Me 262 B-1a/U1 night fighter. There is a copyright of 2016 on the instructions, but this is my first exposure to this sheet.

As with any other EagleCal product, my first impressions are that this is another high-quality product. Opening the ziplock bag, one finds a single, full-color instruction sheet wrapped around a decal sheet (with a protective slip of tissue paper). Three subjects are covered: two operational Luftwaffe night fighters and one a/c that was captured by the US.

Aircraft markings in this sheet are: