Quickboost

1/48 P&W R-2800-10W Engine For the Hobby Boss F6F-5 Hellcat kit

Stock Number: 48298

Reviewed By  Roger Rasor, IPMS# 34117

MSRP: $11.50 Website: www.quickboost.net Quickboost is known for filling a number of voids with highly detailed resin aftermarket parts and sets. This item is intended to add a considerable amount of detail inside the 1/48 Hobby Boss F6F-5 Hellcat cowling…in the form of a Pratt & Whitney R-2800-10W radial engine. The engine is a one-piece resin casting packaged with a separate back plate that, when fitted, aligns with the attachment pegs on the kit part. The engine is molded with a hefty casting block that needs to be removed and there are a few casting gates that may easily be cleaned up with a sharp #11 x-Acto blade. The R-2800-10W displays a wealth of fine details and, much like other Quickboost engines, the push rods are not cast with the cylinders. Instead, there are 18 small recesses for the modeler to locate separate scratch built push rods that can be fabricated from wire or stretched sprue. And, separate ignition wires also may be added for more detail. I was pleased to receive this detailed aftermarket engine with the expectation that I would be able to fit it into the Hobby Boss F6F-5 kit I have been building for review on the IPMS/USA website. However, when I compared it to the engine in the kit, something seemed wrong…with one or the other…because the resin engine was decidedly smaller than the kit engine. I decided to check it against another 1/48 scale engine to see which one was out of scale, so I opened up a Hasegawa Hellcat kit and quickly got my answer. Since the Hasegawa engine matched the size of the Hobby Boss engine very closely, that meant the Quickboost R-2800 was the one that was not accurately sized. It actually scaled out to about 1/60 scale. The photo below shows the Quickboost engine on the left and the Hobby Boss kit engine on the right. Unfortunately, the same undersized one-piece R-2800-10W engine casting is also marketed by Quickboost (packaged with an appropriate back plate) for the Eduard F6F-3 and F6F-5 kits, so the same problem will be encountered by anyone planning to use a Quickboost R-2800 engine instead of the kit engine for their Eduard F6F. However, I cleaned up the casting gates, fabricated the push rods from brass rod and painted the engine to finish the review. As the photo shows, it looks pretty good. But, since I don't have a 1/60 scale Hellcat, I'm not really sure what to do with this little well detailed gem. My thanks to Quickboost for the review sample.