Yet again, extreme thanks to Ross at SAC for providing one more of his new metal gear for improving our kits; The IPMS USA reviewer corps appreciates your continuing to provide us review items… Thanks also to the IPMS leadership for sending it my way to review!

Once again, SAC improves an already great kit’s gear; it is essentially a “form/fit/function” replacement, with just a small tweak which shall improve the basic kit parts….Review switch on.

This set is for Trumpeter’s English Electric Lightning kit. The basic aircraft uses the same gear on all marks, F1 through F6, and all the “T” (trainers)… and this is where the SAC gear shines.

I have included a photo of the basic kit landing gear. Out of the box you get plastic gear for the whole aircraft, or you can opt to use metal struts for strength. This is one of Trumpeters’ best kits out of the box…. It can be improved on, but it’s a great kit.

Wow what a fun little kit to build of a modern USMC war machine. The most interesting thing about the model is this kit can be built as a snap/or press tite build. No glue is actually necessary to construct this model.

Tenax 7 was used to cement all the parts and reacted well to the medium density Hasegawa plastic. Bondo 907 was used for the few seams that needed filling and again worked well with the Hasegawa plastic. I used Testors Clear Parts cement to attach the canopy and AV Plastic Putty for final seam fills and touch ups. The Model was painted overall using both Model Master Enamels and Tamiya Acrylics.

Every part was well and fully molded with no sink marks or pin marks visible. The only clean up on the parts was at the sprue attachment points.

After a massive scratch building job on my 1/35th scale Werner’s Wings MH-47E I needed something simple. Quick. Easy. I needed a Tamiya kit.

Many of you may remember the old Bandai 1/48th scale series of military vehicles. Until Tamiya revived the scale with modern renditions in this scale Bandai was the only game in town for 1/48th scale armor. One of the unique vehicles that Bandai put out was the BMW R-75 motorcycle with sidecar. Finding these was always a pain. I built one of them a long while ago and thoroughly enjoyed it. Could Tamiya do better? That is a rhetorical question.

Packaged in a sturdy 6 x 9 cardboard box with typical quality box art the modeler is treated to a single sprue of light tan plastic wrapped in plastic along with a small decal sheet. The instructions are printed on a long scroll of high quality paper in typical high quality fashion. There is a small decal sheet of license plates and some unit emblems.