This has been a pleasure to work on - I am still on the final exterior painting. Extremely detailed and setup for a lot of options - some of which were not included in the plans. Very cool plans. The only thing I could see that could be improved were the plans - I would have appreciated some more breakout details - especially in placing some of the interior pieces before putting the hull together. If you messed up and put a piece in the wrong spot - off even a little, the hull wasn't going to fit - this is especially important for the cockpit sub-assembly. I like painting the small pieces before removing them from the tree - however, the plans are a bit vague on just where to put the paint and you end up having to go back and scrape a lot of paint off before gluing. This was especially apparent in the cockpit seating - anyway, just a preference. Oh yeah, one more thing that should be added to the plans: because this plane has nose landing gear it requires ballast - however they don't tell you how much ballast to use. I put in about 250 grams and thought that would be enough - not even close. I had to pry apart the nose piece in order to add more ballast - about a 1000 grams. I probably could have gotten by with just 750 grams, but I wanted to make sure and it it has to be in the nose; just forward of the wing landing fear won't do. I also don't believe that there is enough room for that much weight in the area indicated by the plans. A note for the beginner - if you really want to paint your model the way it was in real life - check out as many pictures of the actual plane - history books with pictures are really good. Anyway - even if all you like to do is glue things together - these guys make a very good model and this one well worth the purchase.

Plans are terrible, decals tear at the slightest attempt to reposition them, center of gravity requires you to put several ounces of weight forward of the cockpit, fit of the parts is poor requiring a lot of trimming. Just a lousy model compared to the Tamiya models I have built. Not sure if all of the Academy models are this bad but I would look elsewhere for my next kit.