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Academy’s 1/35 T-34/76 747(r) is the third installment in Academy’s latest T-34 series. The first two offerings were both T-34/85s, the newest version is a T-34/76 in German service.
David Doyle’s latest book continues to expand on Squadron Signal’s long standing In Action series that initiated back in 1971. This is actually the third book to cover the A-26/B-26 Invader in the In Action series. Jim Mesko authored the first in 1984 (1037) followed by Jim Mesko in 1993 (1134), both of which are out of print. This edition by David Doyle adds considerably to the material provided in the first two. Veteran illustrator Don Greer provides the color artwork for the full page length color profiles within this tome. Todd Sturgell provides the line illustrations that depict the differences between variants.
As the First World War progressed, it became clear that one important arm of many nation’s military, the horse mounted cavalry, were doomed to extinction. The era of trench warfare, with its use of barbed wire entanglements and the mass use of machineguns spelled disaster for unprotected men on live animals and who required unobstructed solid ground to be effective. Cavalry required speed and mobility to gain maximum shock value.
‘The Baron and his Funfdecker Fokker’ is a re-release of the classic H-190 kit that was released in 1971. It has been re-released through the years several times as kit number 7236 and now here as 1735. This kit was originally part of the Deal’s Wheels (named after artist Dave Deal) series that primarily focused on car caricatures (13 of them), but a companion kit was issued with it under the title ‘Lucky Pierre of the Lafayette Escadrille’ featuring Pierre hanging on to the upper wing of an inverted Nieuport 17. There were also two WWII era airplane caricatures with the ‘Weiner Moldy and his Blown Messa-Schnitzel 109’ and ‘Flt. Lft. Rif Raf & his Spitsfire’. Now, less you think, that these might not have been real, there were actually four show cars produced as life-sized versions of Dave Deal’s model designs. If you get bored, check out the website: http://treswright.vervehosting.com/ .
Like many aviation enthusiasts and modelers, I have always admired the beauty of Supermarine’s Spitfire design. Although I am admittedly no expert on the type, when Eduard announced their 1/72 version of an already well received 1/48 family of this aircraft, I jumped at the chance to do a review build. The aircraft’s history is well known and extensively documented, so let’s get on with my impressions of this 1/72 scale plastic version.
This kit issue (#70-121) is a completely new mould tooling. It is significantly more detailed than nearly every other 1/72 Spitfire kit out there, and the resulting high parts count will take me some time to build. As there are already some reviews posted out there on other modeling related sites, I wanted to get this in-the-box look out to our membership ASAP. So, I’ll give you my initial impressions in case you’re considering a purchase sooner, rather than later.
