Eduard 1/48 Wellington Mk.I Cockpit Interior Detail Set First Look

By Michael Benolkin

First Look

Eduard from the Czech Republic is easily the most prolific producer of aftermarket details. Period. Their series of photo-etched detail sets have brought additional fidelity to otherwise bland subjects, and have taken even the best-produced models and kicked them up a notch or two with details that cannot be produced with injection-molded plastic.

When Eduard first introduced the acetate-printed instrument faces that go behind their photo-etched instrument panels, this raised the bar on model cockpit reality as you could almost read the time on the aircraft clock. How could they top that?

It took a number of years, but the answer is color photo-etch. Somehow Eduard has developed a process for printing color directly on their photo-etched parts such that now you not only can read the instrument faces, you can now see the color warning arcs around airspeed indicators and color reference circles around Luftwaffe flight and engine instruments.

In this release, Eduard has produced an amazing set of photo-etched details for the beautiful Trumpeter 1/48 Wellington kit. You're going to need some photo-etch skills to make the most of this set!

This set consists of FOUR frets of photo-etched details, two of which are printed in color. You can browse through the high resolution images to the right (click on one to see the large image) to see how fine the color printing has become.

The set starts with that interesting geodetic bulkhead for the rear of the cockpit. You sandwich a series of photo-etched frames between the geodetic bulkhead halves which will require patience and some good tools. The results should be awesome to see compared to the styrene parts this assembly replaces. The rear side of this bulkhead mounts the aircraft's radios and if you look closely, these are the nicest radio faces I've seen in this scale (so far).

Of course the color photo-etch also addresses the instrument panel and this is done quite nicely with three layers of laminate panel. We're not done yet...

Next this set replaces the kit's cockpit crew seats with nice photo-etch seats, then updates the rudder pedals and the center pedestal complete with throttles. So why go to all of this trouble if the kit transparency is installed which would obstruct much of this work?

I'm glad you asked! The instructions have you remove the pitot and copilot side windows as well as the overhead escape hatch. These are replaced with photo-etch frames and acetate transparencies that are positioned all open, thus allowing for unobstructed viewing of your super-detailed cockpit.

We don't stop with the flight deck either. There are other nice details to be applied to the nose turret and around the nose interior. How much of this will be visible is not known yet, but I feel a build coming on!

While this set will really set off the detail in the Wellington kit, this detail set is not for the beginning modeler. You will need to be able to remove the photo-etch parts from their frets (simple once you know how) and then be able to apply these details using cyano adhesives without gluing yourself to the kit parts. It isn'tdifficult, or else these sets wouldn't be so popular.

You should be able to find this detail set at your local hobby retailer or one of the many online hobby shops. Trust me, this is worth looking for!

My sincere thanks to Eduard for this review sample!