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| B-25 Medium Bomber | |
| Product # | MS-43 |
| Manufacturer | |
| Suggested Retail Price | unknown |
Back to Showcase
| Revision Log | |
| 18 December 1999 | converted to Miva |
| 8 October 1999 | page redesigned |
| 25 October 1997 | added illustrations |
| 5 July 1997 | page first published |
You can pick up a toy blimp in the local toy department for less than a dollar.
Mal Wright 
experiments to find a better way to mount aircraft for wargaming.
7,459 hits since 5 Jan 2000
©1994-2024 Bill Armintrout
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This aircraft comes in lots of pieces:
The fuselage is impressively heavy, with molded details including both cockpits, offset waist gunner positions, bomb bay doors, forward wheelwell doors, and tail gunner position (with two tiny gun barrels you'll need to gently straighten out - ours survived some accidentally rough handling). You'll probably need to straighten the stabilizers, but that's to be expected. There's no hole for a flight stand - if you're going to drill one, do it before assembly, towards the forward end of the bomb bay.
The wings attach by way of two pins fitting into holes in the fuselage. Mechanically, the parts fit well, but you'll need to prop the wings into place while the glue dries. Also, you'll need to set the wings at the right dihedral (angle) - a reference book might be helpful here. (Or at least, just get both wings coming off the fuselage at the same angle...) We had paper-thin gaps where the wing tops met the fuselage, that might have been our fault.
The turret comes attached to a sprue with the two guns. Once you cut it from the sprue, it's a tiny part that is easily lost and hard to work on, so do what you can before cutting it loose. You'll want to straighten the hair-thin gun barrels. The pin on the turret drops effortlessly into the hole on the top of the fuselage (but you may need tweezers to handle the turret once you've cut it loose). The "tough decision" is where you want the guns to face...
Speaking of guns, the gun pieces fit easily into the waist gunner openings in the fuselage - so easily, in fact, that there's room to spare.
Last but not least, this leaves the propellers - fine, feathery objects with three blades, and a pin for inserting into the engines. After you cut them from the sprues, you'll need patient fingers to straighten them out. Essentially, you have five options:
Which option you select has a lot to say about where you fall on the modeler/gamer spectrum. :-)
The propellers look best if you orient both in the same direction - and don't count on being able to rotate them once you've inserted them into the engines. If you orient them with one blade directly upwards, the plane can sit on its belly without bending the bottom propeller blades.
This is a nice kit. The sculptor went to some difficulty to figure out ways to get fine details such as propeller blades and gun barrels into this model (which is why the kit has so many parts). The fine detail might take a bruising on the tabletop, though.
56mm length x 73mm width x 7mm height
