The box is the now standard top opening lid and tray affair, certainly strong enough to survive a few months (or years in my case
) in the stash, unlike of course our old friends Revell, whose boxes must think themselves lucky to make it out of the factory intact! C'mon Revell; Get A Grip!!Sorry, I digress!
Back to the topic at hand: We have the usual two & three tone instructions, with 63 stages (!!) for a total of 116 parts. In addition there are two A3 sheets of full colour glossy painting instructions, illustrating the three schemes catered for within the box. The decals are the usual high quality, with everything in register and what looks like good colour opacity.The parts themselves are on three large sprues of light grey styrene, and one of clear. No flash is evident, and a cursory look doesn't throw up any embarrassingly positioned ejector pin marks or sink holes ( I have to admit I haven't gone over it with a magnifying glass though!). In my box, the nose cone has become detached from the sprue, and also the large section of canopy glazing and a couple of other smaller clear parts hence not opening the bag they were contained in.
Panel lines are nicely done; narrower and more refined than some seen recently on some 1/72 toolings (I'm thinking the Me 262 here...) and even some other recent Airfix 1/48 kits. They will certainly look good under airbrushed paint, but brush applied paint may fill them a bit too much.
The instructions offer a few options in addition to the usual wheels up/down; there are two bang seat infills (crew in or out I guess although no pilot figure is included), flaps can be deployed or not and the air brake lowered or not. There is also intake trunking to fill that annoying hole behind the intake on each side
Not being a builder of 1/48 kits, I cannot comment as to how this compares to any other 1/48 Hunters there may be out there from other manufacturers; however it looks pretty good to me, and is certainly Hunter shaped.
