Heinkel He-51: Hasegawa vs. ICM

Is it time to kill-off the old Hasegawa Heinkel 51 kit?

ICM (aka ICM Holding of Ukraine, I’m not sure what ICM means as even in Cyrillic the company uses ICM as its identifier) has made great advances since its early days of chunky low pressure injection kits, and is producing the most accurate (so far) version of the German biplane in 1:72 scale.

The main improvements are detailing and the upper wing.  Overall the ICM kit has better detailing and a main wing that has the correct dihedral (upward sweep).  The ancient Hasegawa kit (first issued in the 1970s) has no dihedral.  However, it seems the ICM wingtips are questionable as they taper back, they should be more evenly rounded.

Click on the pics to make them bigger:

Rare Plane makes a vac-formed kit, the packaging photo looks to have dihedral in the upper wing but I’ve seen completed kits with no dihedral and oddly shaped horizontal tails.  The problem with comparing vac-formed kits to injected kits is that a lot depends on the skill of the builder in cutting the parts from the plastic sheet and then shaping them to form a good join.

A drawback of the ICM kit is subtle, or no, attachment points.   The old Hasegawa kit is easier to build.  My conclusion in comparing the Hasegawa with the ICM He-51 is that while both can be built to look good the ICM has the better detailing and correct dihedral of the upper wing.

There are no major visual differences in the A, B or C versions of the Heinkel 51 (except with the float-plane version).

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