PARC PM 7211

1/72 scale kit of Polikarpov R-5

Updated on August 12, 2013

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PARC is a new Rumanian firm that has a kit of the R-5 amongst its offers, aside the G-11 and A-7 Soviet gliders and the Rumanian fighter IAR-80.

The box of the R-5 features a clear image, probably a colorized photo.

The colors chosen are too vivid, being influenced by old researches. Anyway the illustration is useful as a first documentation of the plane. It shows many details of the engine and rigging, and bombs with their stacks that are not included inside the kit.

Inside the box, we find two sprues of light grey-brown plastic, a nice color painting sheet, an apparently good decals sheet, a bw instruction sheet. No any transparent sprue is included.
   

The sprues have a look similar to some kits of the '60s, Frog in particular.

They are clean enough and don't seem warped, but the level of detail is very poor.

All control surfaces are moulded separately.

Prop blades are separated from the spinner, that has not any recess for them, and is moulded overposed to a part of the sprue so it will require some filing and drilling.

The main pieces are thick and without internal detail.

Some pieces of the inside of the cockpit are provided: floor, seat, bar, instrument panel, machine gun etc, but their quality is poor and will certainly require some scratchbuilding (well, a near complete scratchbuilding I fear).

The cooler has a bad warping on its central part, and will need some photoetched plate (or other texturized surfaces) to cover this defect.

Many highly visible extractor traces can be found on inner surfaces.

The exhaust stacks are without the protruding pipes that are well visible on the box art.

No any bomb or rack are included into the kit.

The surface detail is poor; the cooling slots on the cowling sides are not represented.

The fabric-covered surfaces are simply represented as parallel raised lines; this could be preferable to an overrepresentation, anyway, because those surfaces are only slightly undulated on real planes.

The struts of the wings seem acceptable, while the curved bars under the lower wingtips are too thick and should be replaced by bended brass rods.

 

The decals sheet looks good, and contains a nice instrument panel that could give a good effect on a scratchbuilt one, but is much wider of the plastic piece of the kit and probably won't fit unless the side walls are strongly thinned from inside.

The planes represented on the painting instructions are:

1- Spanish Republican plane during the Civil War; the uppersurfaces are green (unknown if a Spanish or Soviet shade) with apparently light blue undersurfaces (unknown if a Spanish light blue, a Soviet pre-1937 blue-grey or a Soviet post-1937 silver finish).

 

2- Soviet 'white 5' of 620 th Squadron , Caucasus 1942, with prewar livery; red stars should go over the upper wings too.

 

3- Soviet plane at Kharkov Flying Military School, 1935;

4- White 2 used in Soviet-Finnish War 1939-40, with temporary white finish;

5- White 11 transformed into 'limousine' with a raised rear fuselage; this looks attractive, but the pieces for the not so easy conversion are not included into the kit. Anyway the colors are the wartime AMT-4, 6, 7; there were not red stars on the wings upper surfaces.

The instruction sheet.

Note that the instructions sheet shows the windshields that are not included amongst the pieces of the kit.