Far Out Dude!

An enjoyable kit to build and paint! This would be a good kit for beginners who have done some snap-tites and are ready for their first glue & paint kit. It’s also an opportunity for experience modelers to let loose their creative monster art skills!

Part of Deals Wheels collection by Revell based on Dave Deal’s cartoons and far-out caricatures of cars & planes, the Nomad is a reissue of a kit originally issued in 1971. The detail is a little soft and the parts fit is loose, but it’s still a fun kit for beginners and a fun painting opportunity for more advanced modelers.

Attached to the front of a BMW 132K nine-cylinder, 960-horsepower radial engine, the VDM propeller helped the Arado 196 to reach speeds of up to 193 mph at 13,120 feet. The seaplane was used for reconnaissance missions, and it was initially produced in 1937 as a prototype, with the first production planes being delivered in 1938. By the end of production in 1944, Germany and her allies had deployed over 540 of the aircraft during the Second World War.

Scale Aircraft Conversions continues its line of white metal gear with a replacement set for the KittyHawk F-101 Voodoo. The Voodoo is a large, heavy plane, and this set will keep it upright.

The set is cast in SAC’s traditional white metal and consists of 13 parts with minimal to no seam lines. All the parts of the kit gear are replicated in white metal perfectly. For the main gear, the wheel hubs are integral to the strut, and this arrangement is replicated in SAC’s version. The interior bracing is also replicated and attached to the retraction strut.

The front gear is more complicated, consisting of six parts plus the retraction strut. The KittyHawk parts are very fine and the plastic is moderately soft. Thus, as you can see in the pictures, one part of the kit’s oleo was destroyed in removal. Not so with the excellent SAC parts. The front landing gear will certainly be sturdy when the SAC parts are installed.