Eduard 1/350 HMS Hood 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.

Now when it comes to naval subjects, you don't usually associate Eduard with in-depth details for ships. Evidently that will change. When I had the pleasure to review the White Ensign Models' 1/350 HMS Hood Ultimate Detail Set, I wondered how anyone could top this. Eduard has certainly taken up that challenge!

This set consists of FOUR frets of photo-etched details, three of them on large sheets. You can see from the nine pages of color instructions that there's a bit of work afoot. Unlike most of Eduard's releases, this set is reserved for the advanced modeler for the vast number of tiny photo-etched parts that make up this scale make-over of Trumpeter's 1/350 HMS Hood kit.

The set starts with the details on the foredeck with replacement doors for the storage lockers, very intricate structures for the forward shields, and lots of individual parts to replace the molded-on details on the main deck.

One of the interesting touches in this set are the variety of photo-etched hatches and frames that are included, allowing the modeler to pose any number of doorways open or closed.

This set also provides a number of replacement deck structures which replicate the ventilation grilles much better in photo-etch.

The two deck boats get a nice upgrade as well with rudder, wheel, propeller and even railings.

Of course photo-etch is ideal for crane rigging and for radio antennas and this set provides those details nicely.

The plastic grillework over the exhaust funnels is also replaced with nicely done photo-etch.

A number of the smaller weapons get a complete makeover with newmounts, shields, and ammo cans.

What naval detail set would be complete without a variety of railings and ladders. This set provides a wealth of them and detailed instructions of which one goes where.

It is hard to believe that someone could one-up the folks at WEM, but this set definitely gets into more details and will definitely dress up the Trumpeter kit. If you already have the WEM HMS Hood set, you've got a nice set-up for your kit, but you'll probably notice that there are some details tackled by one set and not the other. If you're a real AMS modeler, you might want to get both!

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!

Recommended for advanced modelers!

My sincere thanks to Eduard for this review sample!