After spending a few moments looking at the box art the contents were eagerly emptied onto the bench to be looked at more closely. The instructions are to Eduard’s usual standard a nice booklet and easy to understand.

Parts wise, there are five sprues: four khaki sprues and a clear sprue. Also included is Eduard’s coloured photoetch for the cockpit details and some etched pieces for the grills along with the express mask for the canopy. The decals are again a typical Eduard offering - a good choice of aircraft and the decals are in good register.

On looking at the parts on this kit, they are cleanly cast, the few injector pin marks are in areas that will not be seen once the kit is together so minimal clean up of these will be needed.

I'm sure many of you may have read that the measurements may be very slightly out on this model. For this review I am not getting into that discussion. It looks like a 109 E-1 with good details, nice fit and will build into a great representation of the E-1 and something that the vast majority of modellers will be more than happy with - including me.

Some of the main highlights of the model I found are the full engine, which is optional to display, but looking at the standard of it I personally will be showing it off as it seems a shame to hide it away. The wheels are a nice piece of engineering: two piece separate hubs and tyres. All the control surfaces are separate allowing easy adjustments to make the model unique. The panel lines and rivets are finely detailed - I had seen some photos that made the rivet details look deep but they are not like that at all.

There was some dry fitting carried out and it appears to be a nice kit with no obvious fit issues and should require very little work when building. With the detailing on the model I think even without the Profipack additions it will build into a very stunning model, however I think the etch for the cockpit will help to add that little bit more to this lovely model.

There are four decal options for this kit:
Yellow 11, Fw. Arthur Beese, 9./JG 26, August 1940
Red 1, W.Nr. 4027, Hptm. Hannes Trautloft, Staffelkapitän 2./JG 77, September 1939
Yellow 2, 6./JG 52, Calais, France, September 1940
Brown 13,O Fw. Kurt Ubben, 6.(J)/TrGr.186, March 1940

Once I get round to building the kit I will be finishing it as Brown 13 (the box art plane) as I just adore the witch nose art on it.

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