Eduard 1/72 La-7 Weekend Edition
By Jacob Russell
This is a Weekend boxing of Eduard's excellent Lavochkin La-7 kit. The kit comes in Eduard's customary stout cardboard box, with an attractive illustration of an La-7 in flight, seen from the vantage point of the wingman...
It consists of 56 injection molded parts on 2 sprues. 2 of the parts go unused for this boxing. 50 parts are molded in gray and six in clear. The parts are finely detailed and well molded, albeit from Eduard's previous generation of tooling.
They are a cross between limited-run and the current state of the art, in terms of detail and molding quality. They're still quite good, you just need to exercise caution when removing the parts from the sprues, given the large attachment points. It's worth mentioning that the 2 unused parts are an optional 3 gun cowl and upper decking.
Eduard's customary instructions are in the kit. They include a parts map, and a well illustrated and logical build sequence. The color callouts are for Gunze Mr. Color paints. The decal sheet is clearly printed and in-register. The sheet includes an instrument panel decal.
It has decal options for 2 aircraft, both of which have the 2 gun cowl/upper decking configuration. Both planes are in the VVS color counterparts of RLM 74/75/76: AMT-11/12/7. The planes are:
"White 12," Lt. Col. Filipp M. Kosolapov, CO, 937th IAP/322nd IAD, Prague-Kbely airfield, Czechoslovakia, May 1945. This plane has a red spinner, cowl ring, and triangles outlined in red aft of the cowl ring. It also has white stripes on both the upper and lower wings and 3 diagonal white stripes on the fin and rudder. The white numerals and stars are outlined in red.
"White 14," Maj. A.V. Alelyukhin, 9.GIAP, 1945. This plane has a red spinner and cowl ring. It has a red heart pierced by an arrow on both fuselage sides, aft of the cowl ring. The white numerals and stars are outlined in red.
Last, but by no means least, the kit also includes cloth seat belts, a collaboration between Eduard and HGW. This is a nice touch!
Conclusion
This is a good kit of a very important aircraft the VVS used to help drive the Luftwaffe from the Russian skies. I like this kit and I recommend it. It is reasonably accurate and well detailed. You can always spring for the mask set and Zoom set also available from Eduard. And there is additional help available from the aftermarket, in the form of decals from Print Scale (their la-7 sheet includes at least one 3 gun marking option) and resin wheels from North Star.
I have always been a fan of both the Lavochkin La-5 and La-7 aircraft, and I regard this as the best La-7 in 1/72nd scale. I would like to thank Eduard for providing the review sample.