Zactomodels 1/32 Su-27 Early Tail Stinger First Look

By Michael Benolkin

First Look

Zactomodels is a small aftermarket company that does some of the most incredible engineering and casting to correct selected beloved subjects. This time around, they've added another nice option for the Trumpeter 1/32 Su-27 Flanker B kit.

As you may recall, Trumpeter produced a magnificent Su-27 Flanker B kit in 1/32 scale, the first of its kind in styrene in this scale, but it did have a few minor shape issues here and there. Zactomodels produced a number of details to correct the nose, intakes and canopy of the kit to get them up to AMS Modeler standards. The castings that Zactomodels turns out are quite impressive!

While Zactomodels had turned its attention to other subjects, the Flanker wasn't far from the priority list and they've come back around with several new and interesting conversions and weapons sets to further 'tweak' the Trumpeter kit.

Here is an interesting one-piece conversion - straight out of the bag it looks like a stealth missile or something I'd see in space on the Syfy Channel. In fact, this is a simple backdate part that replaces the Trumpeter kit's tail stinger to render the configuration used by early Su-27s. If you've been wanting to model one of the earlier Flankers and didn't want to surgically alter the kit's stinger, Zactomodels has done the job for you. Simply cut along the relevant panel lines and add this part.

While the stock kit doesn't have an issue with being tail-heavy, Zactomodels did hollow-cast this part so it wouldn't create a tail-heavy model.

As usual, this is a nice bit of engineering from Zactomodels to give you more options in Flanker variants out of the stock Trumpeter kit. When added to the correction sets previously released, your Trumpeter kit will stand up to anyone's scrutiny on the contest table.

You can learn more about this and other project from the Zactomodels website at http://www.zactomodels.com.

My sincere thanks to Zactomodels for this review sample!