1:48 Mosquito B Mk.IV

A wooden bomber without a single machine gun

The designers at de Havilland built an aircraft of plywood and balsa at a time when metal was in short supply, and left out the defensive armament altogether. The bet was simple: what is faster than a fighter does not need to defend itself. A pair of Rolls-Royce Merlin engines gave the machine performance that bore this reasoning out, and the bomber version became one of the most effective weapons of the Royal Air Force.

Raids that made the newspapers

The crews of this version flew over occupied Europe by day and by night and became famous for precise strikes on small targets in the middle of cities. The best-known operation remains the morning raid on Berlin at the end of January 1943, timed exactly to the hour of a radio speech. Later machines of the series received a bulged bomb bay into which a single large bomb weighing around two tons would fit.

What the set covers

The die-cut stencils fit the canopy frames and the nose windows, and circular cutouts for the wheels come with them. They can be laid on with tweezers and pressed down with a wooden toothpick, which will not scratch a clear part. For a number of types the brand also offers a variant with stencils for the inner side of the glazing, but this set deals with the outside, which is enough for an ordinary build with a closed cockpit. Before spraying it pays to blow over the glazing once with clean air to remove dust caught at the edge of the stencil. It is sensible to keep the rest of the sheet until the end of the build, because the final varnish is applied again over covered glazing.