The Little World

I should be interested to find out from whence the Mr Craft Ilyushin 10 mould has come. It has the hallmarks of either a very old 50’s or 60’s model from Frog or Novo or alternately a short-run kit form an unsuccessful Czech form. Perhaps it is a native product of Poland. I’ll never know.

What I do know is that it has enough flaws to make it interesting – flash, mis-moulding, sink marks are all present somewhere. The plastic is soft. Some details are sketchy. Yet there is basically a good airframe under the oddities – you just have to scrape until you find it.

The cockpit is bare, but at least it has two crewmen to fill the seats. Pardon – seat. The gunner gets to slump against the bulkhead and keep himself up by leaning. He’s pretty cramped as it is. But the crew figures are not all that badly cast – I just need to google up Hungarian Air Force uniforms of the 50’s.

Once the bumps are shaved away the basic wing and tailplane assemblies are remarkably true. They even mate with the fuselage decently with enough plastic surface to achieve a good bond. You can’t say that of some Czech kits, and you find yourself putting in surreptitious plastic card wedges to provide some bearing surface.

Now I’ve seen worse seams on more expensive kits. It may not quite the product quality of the Mr. Craft Fairey Fulmar, but with a little discrete filling and paint it should be quite sweet. For a beast.