Eduard

1/72 E2C Hawkeye Painting Mask For the Hasegawa kit

Stock Number: CX236

Reviewed By  Mike Hinderliter, IPMS# 45124

MSRP: $12.95 Website: www.eduard.cz Eduard offers these die-cut, flexible masks for the Hasegawa E2C Hawkeye kit. This is a very complete mask set and appears to have everything you will need to nicely paint any of the versions of the Hasegawa Hawkeye kits. There are masks for painting the wheels, canopy, clear nosepiece, windows and the dish on top. I was doing a review of the new Hasegawa USN Hawkeye 2000, so some of the masks didn’t apply. The ones that I did use were for the canopy and nose. These pieces are mostly painted and are not just framing areas. I was really glad to have a mask for doing them. The mask came off of the sheet well, was easily applied to the part and fit the window panes perfectly. I did use my burnishing tool to make sure that they adhered well and that the paint didn’t get under the mask. When the paint was dry, the masks came up easily and left no tape residue. What a time-saver, especially when you do the bubble pane for the pilot and co-pilot.

I didn’t need a mask for the wheels because Hasegawa molds them as separate pieces that you can paint beforehand The other mask I didn’t use was the one for the radar dish on top of the plane. This one would be indispensable if you were doing the Japanese versions of the Hawkeye so that you could get that black circle on the edge right. Most of the U.S. versions I looked at are painted one solid color. The instructions were clear and had easy-to-understand drawings. Once finished, they look really nice and I didn’t need to do any touch ups because of how well the masks fit. As you can see in the photos the windows came out pretty nice. I’ll just keep the other masks for when I do a Japanese Hawkeye. A big "thank you" to Eduard for doing such a great job in producing these easy-to-use masks, and IPMS USA for the chance to make my modeling easier.