sroubos

Don't know about the accuracy issues, but it does look like an amazing kit to me. Loads of detail for 1/72. Would love to get one.

These guys keep amazing me. Never seen this variant before.

Thanks, I didn't know that. Glad I held off on buying the conversion kit back when it was first released. I'm not sure about fuselage length for Hurricanes but if the 13,6cm that Zvezda indicates is based on the kit that could perhaps point towards this being a I or a II? I see 9,83m quoted for a II which would convert to 13,65cm. I believe the I was about 4 inches shorter? Anyway, we'll soon find out when Zvezda provides some more details. These are great kits to have available, if only because my local hobby shop seems to like Zvezda and generally stocks a lot of these easybuild kits.

Ah, I didn't know that. From the fact that Alleycat released a conversion with just the metal wing (and a newer windscreen I believe) I always thought it would have been a fairly easy way to kit a very popular variant. Perhaps it's still in the pipeline. In the meantime the Arma Hobby is just a treat, one of the best kits in 1/72.

I'm still puzzled why Airfix never released the metal wing version of that kit. Happy to have the fabric wing but it would have been so nice to have that metal wing and buy stacks of it for 5,99 at Aldi every Christmas

For what it's worth, chromate yellow is what Italeri states for those areas on their 1/48 TR-1.

I like their easybuild kits. The 109F was pretty good when it was released, almost on par detail-wise with the FM kit and at a fraction of the price and much better availability. The AZ kits have provided some options now but the Zvezda kit is still the cheapest and easiest way to build an accurate 109F. The same could apply here. There is, strangely, not a lot to choose from when you want to build a good BoB-era Hurricane. Arma's kit is brilliant but more expensive and harder to obtain than this when it is released.

Approaching? My recent Eduard, Tamiya and Clear Prop kits are way beyond what was available in 1/48 just ten years ago. I don't have any recent 1/48 kits so I assume that level of detail is now available in that scale as well but these recent toolings are absolutely stunning in terms of detail. I don't think this AZ kit will be up there but since the SH kit was developed with support from Eduard it just might be at the same level.

The 1/72 landscape for Emils is changing rapidly. I wonder where this AZ and the other new Special Hobby will sit compared to the already quite decent Tamiya, ICM and Airfix releases. Even the older Hasegawa tooling is still a good kit. I can't think of any other plane that is better served in 1/72.

This is the first Fokker-built D-VII release I think. Long overdue in my opinion so happy to finally get it.

It will be interesting to see if this kit is at the same level of Eduard's 1/72 releases. They provide the definitive versions of those kits as far as I'm concerned (Spit IX, FW190, Hellcat...).

Weathering is very convincing, would love to know how you achieved that. Great job!

Lovely job. Good to see it builds up well, initial reviews had me worried a bit, especially the wing warping issue some people reported. Did you experience this?

If anything it will probably be cheaper than the other recent kits.

If I had read the posts discussing those kits here on BM I wouldn't bother releasing them either. Not that those posts weren't in the right of course, they were just sloppy releases.

How accurate is the 1/48 kit? I assume this downscale will not differ very much from that dimensionally.

Wow, this is a bit emotional for me, to see this kit built. I bought this kit when I was ten or eleven, at a yard sale. It sat half-built on a high shelf for 30-odd years. About two years ago my dad dusted it off, he'd started building again a few years earlier after his retirement. He sent me some photographs of his progress over the weekend, he was doing the rigging on it, I was impressed at how good it was starting to look. Anyway, my dad never finished it. On the Monday he passed away of a heart attack. The kit is still sitting on a shelf in his study, with the rigging wires hanging limply across it. It deserves to be finished. Thank you for your post and the inspiration it has given me, I hereby commit to getting mine and my dad's across the finish line

A diorama is actually a pretty neat idea

Yes! Thanks for downscaling it!

I've done the XP-51 from In Korea and I'd like to do the Skyhawks and G-91s from the Flying Tiger trilogy, but it will take some decal design work first.

I'm a long-time Buck Danny fan and despite the vast majority of the books being drawn by Victor Hubinon, I consider the Francis Bergese albums the best ones in the serie. In particular the trilogy he created with the original writer, Jean Michel Charlier, called Nuclear Alert. Over the course of three albums, our hero Buck Danny, with help from his companions Sonny Tuckson and Jerry Tumbler, struggles with a terrorist organization that is planning to conduct a nuclear attack on a world leader summit. They use hijacked atomic bombs and Tomcats to execute their plan. Some years ago I earmarked the Italeri kit, which I bought over 25 years as a teenager from my hard-earned allowance, to represent one of the Tomcats from this storyline, complete with the nuclear weapon they of course never carried in reality. I managed to find two copies of the MicroScale sheets that contained the VF-32 Swordsmen markings. Building the kit was quite straightforward, the Italeri kit is old and doesn't have the nicely recessed panel lines and detail offered by the newer Fujimi and Hasegawa kits, let alone the brand new FineMolds kit. Still, it is reasonably accurate and goes together quite easily. I tried finding an aftermarket atomic bomb but it appears the bomb depicted in the books is not actually based on a real weapon, so I recreated it myself from a 1/48 scale Starfighter tip tank and some card. Decals were the main challenge. The generic items like stencils and insignia came from the box and an Xtradecal sheet. However, the MicroScale decals were in a bad state and I really should have sprayed them with acrylic lacquer before using them. One sheet was completely useless, the other was ok for the colored decals but the ones with just black ink came apart. I decided to add these to the decals I would have to make myself, which included the '204' on the nose and wings and of course the pilot and RIO names to clearly make this Sonny Tuckson's hijacked plane. I found a font that allowed me to easily make the numbers (it's called AmarilloUSAF) and printed them on clear decal paper. So there we have it, my first Tomcat and in quite a unique representation.

Fully agree. Airfix appears to have made a conscious decision to go with these wide-style panel lines for their new toolings. That is their choice. However as a modeller I think you need to take that into account and running half a gallon of black paint into them is not the way to do it.

Personally my experience with QB is very hit or miss. Some of their bits and pieces are ok, but I have bought their Catalina and B-17 1/72 cowling sets to replace the ones in my Academy kits and they are all undersized, diameter a full 2mm smaller than the nacelles they are supposed to sit on. Completely useless. Also their exhaust set for the Hasegawa Ki-61 1/72 is much smaller than the kit part. If you are interested in their sets I would check around first to see if they are accurate.

The way the fuselage is split into top/bottom halves is a smart one. The top and bottom fuselage sections are corrugated which makes it difficult not to obliterate that detail on the Williams kit, which is split the conventional way.

It was suggested that that could be a solution but I haven't actually seen that as confirmed. Can you provide a link to a source from someone who has actually successfully done this? It's quite a dealbreaker for me.