Scale: 1/2500 - right at 1.75" / 4.45cm long by 2.25"/ 5.72cm wingspan

Parts: 9 resin, which includes one each main hull, lower command hull piece, two wings with engineering baffles, two gun assemblies and 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 black Klingon lettering/numbering, Klingon Trefoil emblem and what I'm assuming are the "house" emblem markings.

Molding Quality: 10.0 - pretty darned crisp, with ZERO air bubble on my review sample and only some almost non-existant mold seams that practically remove themselves!

Detail: 10 - Awesomely detailed!

Accuracy: 10 - Looks dead on from the Reference Material found online at Ex Astris Scientia's Klingon Bird-of-Prey Gallery

MSRP: $18.00 USD (~$18.79 CAN/ € 12.54 EUR) available from StarFleet Models

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

Waaaay back in 1984, the Klingons got another new ship - the B'rel-class Bird-of-Prey, a scoutship with a crew of about a dozen officers and men. I'm talking about "Star Trek III: The Search For Spock", of course. The ship was designed by Nilo Rodis specficially for the movie.

An early draft of the script originally called for this ship to be of Romulan design and manufacture, stolen by Klingon Commander Kruge so that he and his crew could use it's small size and cloaking device to sneak in to the Federation. That was eventually removed from the script before shooting began, so the ship was never "really" designed by the Romulans. The Early Klingon Bird-of-Prey from ST:ENT further cements that fact in the canon of Star Trek.

Once again, Gizmotron Models adds another beautifully designed model to his ever-expanding number of great Star Trek related kits. This kit is no exception to the usual high quality we've come to be spoiled from Gizmotron. It's a model that a number of 1/2500 scale fans have been asking to have in "The Sacred Scale" for quite a few years, as previously we've had to settle with the MicroMachine version of this ship.

What You Get

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 9 resin cast pieces: which includes one each main hull, lower command hull piece, two wings with engineering baffles, two gun assemblies and the "piping" around the bridge. No base is included. There is also a small decal sheet which includes the Klingon script, the familiar Klingon Trefoil and another emblem which might be some sort of "house" symbol, but I honestly have no clue. It just looks kewel, so that's all that really matters, right?

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 and clean and consists of mostly raised surfaces on the exterior of the hull, along with some few recessed areas of detail. The wing with enginerring baffles and main hull sections are beautifully done, as is the detailing on the guns.

Assembly and Finish

I've only done a dry-fitting so far. After cleaning the pieces with some some Comet Cleaner™, I rinsed the parts, then cleaned again with Scrubbing Bubbles™ to make sure that any mold release was well and truly gone from the models 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 adhese 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 purchasing several more for my collection (of unfinished kits). My Klingon Fleet has two new additions (I have two of these babies) that look will help strike fear in the hearts of the Enemies of the Empire! If you're a fan of Klingon ships, as I am, this is definitely Must Have! Qa'pla!