hal9001

Price is a market variable, not strictly a kit quality; what applies to USA does not generally represent the "whole globe". In Europe you can easily buy the kit for 85€(95$) and, with a little patience and some search, even for 75€ (83$)...that's what I paid and for such a level of price I can't complain. To give some perpective, in Europe we pay 65€(71$) for an Hasegawa P-47 (and they are almost impossible to find). Hasegawa kits are miles better as surface detail BUT they give nothing more (only a pilot), no engine, no deep interior details, even no seatbelts! You have to buy them at extra cost and still you have a serious problem with the engine and cowling alignement that requires some surgery... reshaping a prop spinner or correct the rib stitchings should not be a too daunting task for any medium-level modeller....and anyway how many aftermarket spinners were sold to correct Hasegawa BF-109s? Modelling market is a business and as such every player tries to get a slice of the pie, you're the only judge of your money, but nothing is "mandatory" and some things are almost "futile" (not to say useless like the Eduard set for the 1/32 Macchi). Recent Tamiya 1/32 kits are almost "perfect", nontheless there are tons of aftermarket sets worth many times the already high price of the kits...do you really need them? I'm not a fan of Italeri, they're one of the worst money scrounger on the modelling market, but their 1/32 kits are the only reason I keep an eye on their catalogue. Merry Xmas from me, my lasagna and my bottle of Chianti... P.S.The name Aermacchi only applies to the post WWII production

Gun ports/blast panels, I suppose were made of steel and riveted with round head rivets (too hard embossing steel for flush rivets). Italeri reproduction is oversized and "blurry", you can try to improve them("resculp" them with a beading tool or even a cutted syringe needle) or simply eliminate them, they are not so visible in reality. The gun ports were painted with a black heat resistant primer

The gap is intentional and needed to compensate engine vibrations (or better to avoid propagating cowling vibrations), same as Ju-87 and even BF-109, it also helps to easily remove the panels for maintenance. Engine covers are phisically and visually disconnected from the rest of fuselage skin, the gap goes around the oil radiator too

I'm a great fan of Iain's builds (miss them and still hope to build a better BAC Lightning and B-24 thanks to him) and all I know started from his research. I already answered a similar question in the past and now I'm far from my Revell kit but I found some pictures I took for the old post (and never published) and THIS: Anyone whith a minimum aircraft knowledge realizes that something is wrong. I copy this from my old post: "The problem with the He-219 nacelles is real and if you start to look at pictures of the real plane it become prominent, in short the nacelles are wrongly positioned in relation to wings and fuselage. They should be tilted frontward so that the back tips line up to the trailing edge, and not below as in a out of box model, consequently the propeller thrust line will assume the correct downward attitude and the floor of the wheel bay will concide with the under-wing skin." Is this relevant? Well... is the P-51 wheel well error in many older kits, or the cowling or spinner shape of some Me-109 relevant? Common people will simply recognize a PLANE, someone can tell the name, very few the specific model...only those who REALLY spent time studying the subject, looking at pictures of real planes and READING forums like this will be aware of these details...In the great scheme of things this is just a hobby and we could just trowl some plastic, glue and paints or even get a piece of wood, cut and shape by the eye and call it a Spitfire, as we did 50 or 60 years ago, as long as we have fun everything is fine.. As a matter of fact the kit is wrong in this area, but it's not too hard to correct, I spent more time smoothing/detailing the interior of the nacelles than repositioning them, and even if you build the kit out of the box you have ugly seams there...

Parts 37(?), 39, 40, 41, 42 Notice how Italeri changed the photoetched fret, the upper pic is from Italeri website, the lower one is from the actual kit (part 63 added at the last minute?!)

Trumpeter Eurofighter is wrong literally from nose to tail. Not even worth to spend money trying to correct it, if you don't want to bin it, use it as a fast practice or just for fun and than forget it. Buildability is quite good, but again if you look a little to close to the parts you start to see all the inaccuracies and oddities, like those "walls" inside the intake trunk. Trumpeter Su-30 is an imposing kit and requires lots of work both if built from the box or if you want to correct its inaccuracies. It's a good kit but far from perfect in terms of buildability and correctness (watch out for the right vertical tail tips among other things) and being almost 20 years olds has some molding "limitations" on the details and some mating surface. F-35 is problably the more trouble free to build. The only real inaccuracies is the small exhaust, and only need some details to reach a good results. Moulding it's not perfect but it's just a matter of some putty to correct a couple of sink marks and some joint line

The problem with the He-219 nacelles is real and if you start to look at pictures of the real plane it become prominent, in short the nacelles are wrongly positioned in relation to wings and fuselage. They should be tilted frontward so that the back tips line up to the trailing edge, and not below as in a out of box model, consequently the propeller thrust line will assume the correct downward attitude and the floor of the wheel bay will concide with the under-wing skin.

The newish 1/48 Airfix kits have correct floors and probably the only one with the correct nose for the B model

Well, working on the newish Revell Spitfire MkII right now and... - does it have a fat mid fuselage? Yes... but to me it looks more like a sort of deformation (the ribs and spars inside the cockpit are correspondingly bowed outside) and some judicious finger pressure (almost) solved the problem! The wing fillets need some serious filing and shaping to make them thinner and more concave. All the canopy sections have some errors and discrepancies: the rear fixed portion is too short and needs two strips of plasticard which will also replicate the missing frames on the front and the rear(and probably I will add also a little strip on the lip of the fuselage to extend it), the square indentations between the access door and the hood must be filled with a small piece of plasticard and the door itself (and the corresponding aperture) is less than a 1mm too short. The sliding hood needs some straightening of the bottom edges and the windscreen must be moved a little back ( and the small pip on the front edge of the pilot entrance must go away) - is the nose wrong? Yes... but not dramatically. The tip behind the spinner disk plate is slightly large (less the 1mm) and pear shaped and the engine cowlings are a little too long OR NOT? I don't have a real Spit I on hand and the drawings are not definitive, some match very well others show an extra length (less than 2mm), so I took an unorthodox approach: the engine cowlings of the Tamiya Sipt IX are 7mm longer than the Revell ones, then I took the measurement of the Merlin 60 and the Merlin II and there are about 6mm of differences in 1/32 , then again I measured the Tamiya Spit I in 1/48 and... it matches the Revell nose quite well. Conclusion: probably the Revell nose it's not totallly correct but honenstly I don't think anyone will really notice it, I will try to get a smaller diameter on the prop spinner plate(and to do this I'll probably modify the bottom cowling which is a little sospicious) and I'll round up a little the contour and fill the square indentation on each side of the tank and that's it. A last note on the rivets: they are in the same places like on the Tamiya Spit (so both correct or both wrong) and are a little heavy, but they are a representation not a reproduction of a real feature, like all the recessed rivets and panel lines on all models, and if excessive, they can be toned down smoothing a little the whole surface (and this will also take care of many other production blemishes ). A couple of evenings should be enough to get a perfecly acceptable fuselage. The wings are, in my opinion, a little more involving, the radiators need corrections (the water one) or complete rebuilding (the oil one), the ailerons need conversion from metal (with rivets) to canvas (with ribbing) surface, the wheel well bulges on the upper wings are wrongly shaped and the reinforcing plates on the leading edge must be eliminated BUT, most important, there is an evident and disturbing bulging of the center section of the wing which infect the carburetor and the lower engine cowling. This must be corrected and Iain and Derek gave perfect advises in their thread so... There are some others points that can be discussed, like the too pointed spinner or the slightly convex (instead of concave) wheel rim, the missing or incorrect details in the cockpit or the low quality of the molding but overall the Revell one is the best route to obtain an early Spitfire, especially in Europe where it can be found easily at around 20 euros (and even less), if only there were some more corrections and accessories and more readily available... Hasegawa (which has some merits depending on the specific re-boxing) and Hobbyboss are both more expensive and difficult to find (the Hase is almost impossible) and share some problems. I have the Trumpeter big brother Spit V in 1/24 and it was clearly based on the old Hasegawa with its squared fuselage and the same fake interior cockpit and additional mistakes like the ribbed stabilators!!!, and all these peculiarities were faithfully reproposed in the Hobby Boss 1/32. So you have a very old Hasegawa with a not so accurate fuselage that needs rescribing and a wing that needs new radiators to be backdated to the early Spit I or II (plus all the details in the wheel wells, a completely new cockpit and possibly propeller and wheels) or the Hobbyboss whit a similar shape but beautifully scribed and dotted but with lacking details and wrong parts... Not an easy choice

Checked one of my two kits which I bought around three years ago and the canopies look perfectly clear

If my memory is not wrong, the Eduard Mig-21MF is generally accepted as a correct kit, but even Eduard may have problems, I don't know if the Mig-21bis nose was corrected not to talk about me-109. No manufacturer is guarantee of constant and absolute accuracy, and the same applies to drawings

Hello, do you really trust those drawings? Trumpeter is not the most reliable about accuracy but many drawings are even worse, some of the worst problem in the Trumpeter kit happened because they based the kit on wrong available drawings. My suggestion is to check the fuselage against pictures of the real aircraft and compare the overall shape and the relative positions of details. You can't easily get measurements from a picture because there are always distortions, but a good straight lateral image can give more useful informations about the real plane. Drawings are a rapresentations of reality and checking a kit against them is like comparing kits of the same subject from different manufacturers. About your drawings: are you sure the drawings are in the right scale? You correctly said that 1/48 enlarged at 150% gives 1/32 but: - is your original drawing in a perfect and uniform 1/48 scale? - is your scanner/printer so accurate to give precise and constant enlargement? Looking at your pictures the drawing and the half-fuselage seems to be in slight different scale, I don't know which one is the correct 1/32, but the drawing looks larger than the kit. Try to print another copy of the drawing with a little less enlargement (149 or 148%) in order to get the best possible match between the kit part and th drawing and start from there. It may seems odd, but I believe is the better way to go if you don't want to completely modify the whole kit. Then comparing the drawing with pictures I have some considerations but I'm not really sure: - the nose seems to drop down a little too much and the upper looks too curved - if the wing root is correctly aligned,, the kit auxiliary side intake is in a better position than the drawing

I have some concerns about the lerx and the wing airfoil, look at the junction between them and you'll see a strange line/step while the original has a smooth transition Compare the first second of this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=17&v=oppisAcfV0k and any image like this It seems like it lacks some sort of fillet