Tornado IDS Special Colors

Italeri's Tornado IDS turned out to be a pretty nice kit, although it required a lot of work to get there. The kit has engraved panel lines, but they are a little on the heavy handed side, in my opinion. Part fit was not the worst I've seen, but far from the best. Putty was required where the vertical stabilizer connects to the fuselage, along the air intakes, and where the front half of the fuselage connects to the rear half. The parts making up the two front halves of the fuselage were slightly warped in my kit, and I was unable to totally correct them. The wings and weapons pylons are able to move from fully swept back to fully forward, which is cool. The instructions, while being mostly easy to follow, sometimes left the placement of small parts (like antennas, pitot tubes, etc.) to the builders best guess. This problem was made worse by the fact that many of the parts did not have locator holes or pins, so be prepared to do some internet research to get the correct position for these parts. The cockpit detail was a little sparse, but featured raised detail on the instrument panels and it ended up looking nice under the large canopy with a few scratch-built ejection seat handles and harnesses, etc.. The canopy is only able to be in the closed position, at least without some surgery. No pilot figures are included. Painting instructions were good - I chose to go with the British version. Which leads to the one of the more disappointing parts of the kit - the decals. The cartograph decals were on the thick side and silvered badly even though I put them down on a very smooth clear gloss coat and tried three different types of decal setting solution. They finally settled partly into place when I continuously bathed them with Solvaset for about 5 minutes apiece. The final result looks very impressive and I'm glad that I stuck with the kit, even with its few warts. Overall, I would cautiously recommend the kit.