Review: Eduard 1/48th Fw 190D-9 Weekend Edition

Eduard have pretty much exhausted the lines of their FW-190 boxings, having captured nearly every one of the variants of this purposeful fighter - but now just in case you liked to know what was in all of the Wurger boxings well our man Gary Wickham has reviewed their latest Fw-190D weekend kit in 48th scale...

Eduard 1/48th Fw 190D-9 Weekend Edition
Kit No:84101
1/48 scale.
Model length: 215mm
Wingspan: 199 mm
Plastic parts: 150
Marking options: 1 aircraft -
- Fw 190D-9 Stab/JG 4, Frankfurt am Rhein-Main, April 1945
Available from: Eduard directly & most model shops

The Eduard Weekend Edition range provide the simplest (and cheapest) variant of each of the Eduard kits (this was true until Eduard recently started providing Overtree kits which contain only the plastic sprues). High quality decals are designed and printed by Eduard and typically only feature one scheme in the Weekend boxing. The weekend editions are typcially very fair in price and do not contain the photo-etch or painting masks typically found in their bigger Profipack brothers.

I am a big fan of the Weekend boxings and indeed most of the Eduard kits I have are the weekend editions. Why ? Well lets consider decals, if I only have one model in the box, do I really need to pay for a decal sheet that has 6 options ? Thats really 5 decal options that I most likely won't be using. Yeh, it gives me more choice, but if the scheme provided in the weekend edition appeals to me, its a no brainer.

The Profi-packs do also come with one or more photo-etch frets but I can also buy those separately if I think the kit will benefit beyond the plastic parts (which in most cases the Eduard tooled kits are so good that adding PE really only marginally improves what is on the sprues). Likewise the paint-mask can be purchased outside the kit and if, like me, you are happy to use some elbow grease to do your own masking, thats not a priority either

Basically the weekend editions offer excellent value for money because in most cases the Eduard kits are so far superior than competing kits from other manufacturers that you really don't need aftermarket anyway !!

Onto the review and let me say upfront that I am not a Luftwaffe experten nor do I intend to critically appraise this kit for accuracy compared to the real aircraft. What I have done is take some detailed photos of the kit sprues to allow you to make your own mind up as to the quality of this kit and whether you want to part with your cash for it.

They say a photo is worth a thousand words so let me stop typing right now and let you start looking at what Eduard provides in the box.

The Plastic

;

The Transparencies

The Decals
Marking options: 1 aircraft
- Fw 190D-9 Stab/JG 4, Frankfurt am Rhein-Main, April 1945

(- this is the aircraft that most think is the same kite - although it cannot be proven as the markings are partially covered)

The Eduard supplied decals are of a very high quality. Having used them before I can confirm that they are thin and respond well to most decal setting solutions. If you like the kit markings you will get excellent results with these decals.

Conclusion
I will leave it to others to assess this kit in terms of shape and dimensional accuracy. One thing I did notice is that when compared to say the Tamiya 1/48 FW-190 kits, there is a lot more detail provided out-of-the-box by Eduard. A good example would be the fuselage and wing root gun bays. For any other FW 190 kit you need to buy resin aftermarket to model these open, with Eduard you get this on the sprues.

It's touches like these that make these Weekend editions such good value and even though I have not yet built one of the FW 190 kits, I am pretty confident from other Eduard builds that the fit will be superb.

Thanks of course to Eduard for the review kit, its my intention (the road to hell .. and all that) to build this kit one day.

Gary Wickham

Thanks to Eduard for giving us the chance to review this kit

Appendix