Star Wars 1/48 FineMolds Tie Fighter

[cobraleader]

G'Day All,

Just got home from helping my neighbours with cleaning up after the Queensland flood :'( and found the postal service has lived up to their motto .

I found the latest FineMolds Star Wars 1/48 Tie Fighter waiting for me. Purchased from HLJ a month or so ago.

So here is a quick inbox review (sorry no pics just yet).

Box is slightly bigger than the 1/72 scale and about the same height.
Box is Blue with a pic of 3 Tie's flying away from a Star Destroyer.

3 bags of sprues for all 7 sprues.
Quick look over the parts, you get a clear sprue for the cockpit, black sprue for the Solar Panels, Grey sprues for everything else.
Simple set of decals (about 25 decals all up)
Instruction sheet is about the same as the box.

Quick flick through the instruction booklet - looks very similar to the 1/72 instructions. Quick comparison and the 1/72 scale instructions have 12 steps, while the 1/48 has 8 steps. It basically the same instructions condensed into 8 steps. (pity was hoping for more)

Quick look at the parts - 43 parts total (40 parts in the 1/72 kit)..
Parts detail is similar to the 1/72 kit. Crisp parts and detail, no flash and some pin marks in areas you won't see - unless you pose the cockpit door open, then some filling and clean up required. Maybe some clean up of the solar wing frames will be required before gluing them to the solar panels
Different Display Stand.

There is a Tie Pilot and a Imperial Commander instead of a Stormtrooper, like the 1/72 kit has.

Its looks like the 1/48 kit is an up-scale version of the 1/72 kit. It looks like it goes together the same way (well it has too since it has the same instruction steps.)

Overall, I'm a bit disappointed, would have thought the 1/48 kit have more to it, especially since it's about double the price of the 1/72 scale kit.

Might do a side-by-side build review of it with the AMT-ERTL and FineMolds 1/72 kits soon.

Catch you all later


Thanks

cheers
Mark

 

[dedalus5550]

I thought the same thing. If you liked the 72nd scale kit but wanted something bigger, here it is. Otherwise, I dunno. The parts are almost exactly the same, with almost no added detail that I could discern. Of course, the 72nd kit is very impressive, but you would think there must be something more they could do. I felt the same about the 48th scale X-wing, which even loses some detail over the 72nd scale kit. I really want a 48th scale Y-wing, but now I guess it will be exactly like the 72nd scale kit but bigger. Of course, Fine Molds still makes some really nice kits.