Aires

1/48 Seahawk FGA Mk.4/6 Cockpit For the Trumpeter kit

Stock Number: 4385

Reviewed By  Chris Durden, IPMS# 29474

MSRP: $23.95 Website: www.aires.cz Aires has followed-up their nicely detailed wheel well detail set with an equally as detailed cockpit set for the Trumpeter 1/48 Seahawk. The set comes in their standard bubble pack consisting of 7 crisply cast resin pieces, a fret of 21 photo etch parts and a small clear acetate sheet for the instrument faces. Unfortunately, the tight confines of the packaging caused the throttle quadrant details to be broken off - easily fixed, but an annoyance. Normally, I would have assembled the kit cockpit to offer a comparison but in this case it is totally not necessary (and I ran out of time). The Trumpeter details are toy like in comparison to the detail offered in the Aires set. This is especially evident given the Trumpeter ejection seat is poorly detailed, too wide and the offered belts are anemic. By contrast; the casting quality of the resin is first rate and is well detailed and in sharp relief. The photo etched pieces are also well done and the seat belts are more proportional and easily assembled.

Construction starts with lots of sawing and sanding to remove casting blocks. You will also need to remove sidewall details and locating pins on the Trumpeter kit to assure that the top and bottom fuselages will close correctly. It was here that I ran into difficulty because of the instructions. While the instructions show placement and assembly sequences for the detail parts, there are no corresponding instructions related to modifications to the Trumpeter kit aside from "Warning: thinning of plastic parts and dry-fitting of the assembly needed!". Thank you Captain Obvious! After dry-fitting I ended up removing the back bulkhead on the fuselage and thinning the interior do that the Aires bulkhead could slide into place - so far, so good. You will note that part number 1 (the instrument shroud) is significantly shorter than the kit part so I went ahead and cut the kit part off, thinking that they know what they are doing. I was totally wrong because I ended up building the area back up so that the instrument panel was located correctly in relation to the cockpit tub (I am not convinced that I got it right either). This is where more helpful instructions would have been appreciated. Once all the cutting and trimming was completed I painted everything black. ….The award for most boring cockpit colors goes to…."the Post-War Royal Navy"! Not content to lose all of the detail, I then did some post shading with the airbrush with shades of grey to enhance the shadows and add some interest. I understand that this may not be totally realistic, but otherwise the cockpit is a black hole and then why bother with a detail set?

I added some detail painting followed up with a light grey wash (Promodeler wash) and a dirty black/brown wash. It was my first try with the light grey and it worked well, but was easy to overdo. After a final flat coat I tackled the clear gun sight parts and while it assembled fairly easily, I was not happy with my efforts. Not Aires' fault, but a self induced error. Final assembly was not fun because it seemed that; despite my previous "thinning of plastic parts and dry-fitting of the assembly needed", nothing fit quite right. Basically, the problem with the instrument panel shroud threw everything off and I believe that I ended up with the shroud way too deep. While this was gain, self induced, I would place a portion of the blame on the poor instructions included in the detail set. In conclusion, the Aires set is a definite improvement over the kit parts and look impressive. However, it requires some fiddling to get it to sit correctly that is exacerbated by a lack of guidance in the instructions. A few more illustrations such as "remove this" or "cut off x mm from here" would make the process less frustrating. My thanks to Aires for the detail set sample.