The Little World

My local hobby shop gets in batches of Mister Craft kits every year or so. They stick around a long time, as some of them are repeaters – say a Focke-Wolfe mould just reboxed endlessly with different decals.

Others are unique and you snap them up as they appear – always hoping that they are a reasonable copy of whatever mould the company has bought. In this case I was in luck – the Karas is an old Heller mould and it is actually very good indeed.

Note that I do not go into raptures or agonies about seam lines being sunk or raised – both approaches work for me, and if the latter version is older and cheaper, I do not mind it at all.

The sprue trees for this are definitely Heller as the details of the maker are moulded inside the fuselage.I have four examples of the kit, in three different boxes, and they are all the same kit. I would have settled for one, but the other three arrived unannounced as gifts and are yet to be fully utilised. You’ll see two planes built of this type and I am sitting on the other two until they are needed.

The plastic is decent 70’s material and the flash is low. Few sink marks are seen and the ejection pillars are decently hidden. I have no qualms about the clear canopies in any of the mouldings – in fact I think they are all made by Heller and just shipped out as a bulk order.

I will give Mister Craft the nod for their colour call-out – it provides the best speculative schemes for the plane in a clear form. This might sound bleeding obvious, but colour call-outs should be printed in colour, and not just depend upon a cross-hatched black and white drawing to show the possibilities. We’ve come a long way past that!

The decals are of variable quality amongst the four packagings. I intend to start with the simplest ones in case they prove frangible, and only risk the more complex patterns once I know things are going to go down.

I must confess to some confusion in the model moulding business over who makes what – to which you have to add the question of who they supply it to. In some cases I have never actually been able to figure out why some prototypes are chosen.