Scale: 1/2500 - right at 2.25" / 5.72cm long by 2"/ 5.08cm wingspan

Parts: 12 resin, which includes one each main hull, two wings, engineering "hump", warp nacelles, three part lower gun assembly, and three parts for the "piping" around the bridge (no base).

Instructions: One page,two sided which is part of the packaging. One side serves as a good guide for where all parts need to go and the flip side serves as both as a painting and decal guide

Decals: One full-color sheet. Decal sheet includes red feather pattern, black Klingon lettering/numbering and Klingon Trefoil emblem markings.

Molding Quality: 9.99 - pretty darned crisp, with exactly ONE air bubble on my sample, only some very minor mold seams that will easily be removed

Detail: 10 - Nicely detailed

Accuracy: 10 - Looks Dead On from the Reference Material found online at Ex Astris Scientia's 22nd Century Klingon Ships gallery.

MSRP: $20.00 USD (~$21.44 CAN/ € 14.58 EUR) available from Federation Models

Overall Rating: 10 - Very nice kit that needs very little cleanup work

Regardless how you felt about the series, I think most of us will agree that we got some of the most interesting designs of any Trek series since TNG and DS9 ended their respective series runs. One of those designs is the Early Klingon Bird-of-Prey, which first appeared in the Season Two finale, "The Expanse".

Gizmotron Models adds this design to his ever expanding number of great Star Trek related kits. This kit is no exception to the high quality we've come to expect. It's a ship design that a number of fans have been asking for since it first appeared on the small screen and we're finally getting one in 1/2500 scale.

What I Got

The kit comes packaged in a small ziploc bag on backing board with a color painting guide which also serves as decal placement guide. You get a total of 12 resin cast pieces: one each main hull, two wings, engineering "hump", warp nacelles, three part lower gun assembly, and three parts for the "piping" around the bridge. No base is included.

There is also a small decal sheet which includes the red feather pattern for the underside of the wings and forward command sectoin, as well as the various Klingon script and familiar Klingon Trefoil. As mentioned, the backing card is also a basic two-page, front and back instruction and painting/decal sheet. The resin appears to be the standard gray resin that we've come to expect from Gizmotron the last several years. The resin pieces have only a touch of flash and with very little in the way of some seam lines. What little bit of both that exist are easy to take care of with a bit of Xacto and sand paper work.

Detail is crisp & clean and consists of mostly raised surfaces on the exterior of the hull, along with some few recessed areas of detail. The engineering section and warp nacelles are beautifully done, as is the detailing on the two sets of guns.

Assembly and Finish

I've only done a dry-fitting after cleaning the pieces with some some Comet Cleaner™, rinsed the parts, then cleaned again with Scrubbing Bubbles™ to make sure that any mold release was well and truly gone from the model's surface. Just a very little bit of sanding was required to remove mold seams and there were just two airbubbles present on my sample - both will be easy to fill. The dry-fit assembly was straight foward with the parts fitting very easily and requiring no additional work to get them all to fit. I've used "Super Glue Gel" (Duro brand) to affix the parts of my other Gizmotron Models kits together and imagine that there will be no problem with this kit, either.

Conclusions

I'm very happy to own this and look forward to completing it for my collection, at some point in the future. My pre-TOS Era Klingon Fleet has two new additions (I have two of these babies) that looks pretty amazing, IMNSHO. If you're a fan of Klingon ships, as I am, this is definitely Must Have! Qapla'!