Kit

This is another of Dragons “Black Label” kits. The model is boxed in a sturdy box with a nice painting showing the vehicle used in West German markings. Inside you will find seven spruces molded in grey plastic. Also one clear spruce, lower hull section, four Dragon DS track links, small decal sheet, instruction fold out sheet, and a photo reference sheet with photos of a vehicle at the famous Deutsches Panzermuseum Munster located in Germany. The parts are flash free with some mold lines that clean up very well. Dragon includes a correction instructions sheet for step 15. The correction is a simple one in that all is needed is to cut off a piece of a part and glue it in a different area. The parts count is just right and I found that there are only two parts left over after the build - something that I’m not used to with a Dragon kit as my parts box usually gets stuffed after a Dragon kit build. No PE fret is included in the kit.

The Zvezda kit has been out for few years now and it is without a doubt the best La-5 in 1/48 scale. Surprisingly, the folks at Aries/Quickboost have been busy creating resin upgrades specifically for it. Releasing new items this late in the game is a testament to the kits potential. I’ve had my kit for a while now waiting to perform an all out super build. I’ve collected a few goodies; mainly Eduard aftermarket sets, flaps and such, and needless to say when I spotted new items from Aires’s Quickboost line for it I offered to review all of them. Besides the control levers I also received the Quickboost La-5FN seat with safety belts #QB48 611 and from Aires the La-5FN cockpit set #4629 to review. Since the Aires cockpit set offers basically the same control lever I will be using that one. However as you can see in the photographs with the Quickboost offering you get 3 identical levers.

This is the third release, by HK Models, of their large-scale B-25, and in my opinion, the most interesting version. The B-25H was armed to the teeth, with fourteen .50 caliber machine guns (eight fixed forward and fired by the pilot) and a 75mm howitzer. The kit comes in a very large top-opening box, with another front-opening box inside. There are twenty-nine individually-packaged sprues, with a total of 563 parts. Slide molding is used to add nice details, like hollow barrels on the MGs and rifling on the 75mm gun.

Molding is very crisp, with good detail and little flash. However, mold lines are prominent on most parts, meaning a lot of cleanup is required. The box boasts over 500,000 rivets are molded into the model. Most of the rivets look very good, but along the top and bottom of the fuselage, they are shallow and elongated- likely due to limitations of the molds. The clear parts are crystal clear, although sprue attachment points are large.