1:32 Horten Ho 229B Canopy & Wheels Paint Masks Set

The two-seat night form of the flying wing

The two-seat variant of the Horten tailless aircraft stayed on the drawing board. A lengthened center section was planned, with a second crew member seated behind the pilot and a search radar for work at night. Before the end of the war only the single-seat prototype got as far as being partly built, and its remains lie today in an American storage facility, so the two-seat machine is one of the favorite subjects of modeling speculation.

Why a tailless layout at all

The Horten brothers had been building gliders without a fuselage and without tail surfaces since the 1930s, and they arrived at a jet combat aircraft as the natural continuation of that line. The wing had a wooden stressed skin, two jet units side by side inside the center section and a nose gear, a very unusual combination for German equipment of 1945.

What the set solves

The scope is deliberately narrow: the glazing and the wheels. The clear part gets cut-outs that follow the run of the frames, and for the tires there are discs that cover the tread, so the rim can be sprayed separately without tracing the boundary by hand. These are exactly the two things that take the most time in hand work and where mistakes happen most often.

The film is laid onto polished glazing that has not been treated with anything, and after spraying it is lifted with the tip of a toothpick so that nothing gets scratched. It also pays to fit the clear part to the fuselage only after the surrounding paintwork is finished, otherwise the masked area keeps collecting dust and has to be cleaned again and again. The wheels are best completed separately, away from the model, and fitted to the landing gear at the very end. Paints and the model are not part of the shipment.