Manufacturer: Eduard
Product: FE 435
Airacobra Mk.I S.A. Zoom for Hasegawa kit
This review was first published at the IPMS/USA
website (http://www.ipmsusa.org)
Reviewed by: Pablo Bauleo
The Airacobra/P-39/P-400 series
of airplanes, due to their car door access deserves a detailed cockpit. The
Hasegawa kit provides a very nice cockpit out of the box, but Eduard provides
an even nicer detail with this fret.
The Zoom PE detail fret is
intended to be simpler and require less bending/folding/painting than their
full-blown counterpart. I like that. But, this fret is of the “self-adhesive”
kind and, honestly, I didn’t like that. The glue was missing in half of the
fret (maybe it was intended that way), and having to remove the part while
keeping the wax paper attached to the back, it wasn’t as simple as I thought it
would be.
I also came across to a minor
issue with the seatbelts. According to the instructions you are supposed to get
the two-part seatbelt together and then fold the buckles from the back part
onto the front one. However the seatbelts were molded together with the back
part seatbelt, as a single piece. I just left out the top part of the seatbelt,
to keep the buckles visible.
Now, on the bright side, the
instrument panel is delightful, very simple to assemble and very realistic on
its looks. The machine gun handles, very prominent in this aircraft, are very
nicely rendered, as well as all the instrument dials and bezels.
The fret also includes side
console and cockpit door details. I like the placards for the doors. You cannot
read them, but you can see them very clearly and adds to the whole cockpit
“feeling” of the kit.
I had a mixed experience with
this fret, but overall it was a positive one. The fret is simple to work with (mostly
flat parts and just a few bends) and it provides a lot of detail. The only
downside is the self-adhesive. In my humble opinion, it makes the assembly more
difficult, instead of simpler.
I would highly recommend it for
any modeler that has a few PE under their belt, and even to the modeler that is
itching to break into photo-etch details. As I said, the Zoom frets are amongst
the simplest ones to work with.
I would like to thanks Eduard for
providing the review sample and IPMS/USA for allowing me to review it.
