Welcome to the IPMS/USA Reviews site!

Introduction: The primary organization of the IPMS/USA Review website is by IPMS/USA National Contest Class. Within each Class there are sub-menus by kits, decals, books, etc. The Miscellaneous Class is for items that are not class specific or that cross two or more classes.

IPMS/USA Members: We encourage you to submit reviews, both here and to the Journal. To volunteer for membership in the IPMS/USA "Reviewers Corps" and submit your own reviews, please read the Guidelines For Submitting Product Reviews.

Manufacturers, publishers, and other industry members: IPMS/USA is pleased to offer your company the opportunity for product reviews. All product reviews are performed by IPMS/USA members, and are posted in the publicly-accessible section of our website. With very few exceptions, we perform full build reviews of new kit releases, aftermarket products, and supplies. If you would care to provide product samples for review, please contact John Noack, IPMS/USA 1st VP.

To learn more about IPMS/USA, please see our About Us page.

Review Author
Bill O'Malley
Published on
Company
MiniArt
Scale
1/35
MSRP
$33.50

This kit is one of MiniArt’s Diorama Series and includes a damaged brick wall section cobblestone street, and streetlight. The kit comes boxed with parts in a plastic bag. Kit contains three vacuum formed pieces for the wall sections, wall cap and base. The kit also includes one molded plastic sprue for the streetlight fixture. The base section has cobblestone pavers, piles of rubble, and rubble behind the wall. The cobblestone base has a worn vehicle track at an angle across the front. The wall is set at a slight angle and the base appears to have enough space for one 1/35 scale vehicle plus a few accessories.

Review Author
Bill O'Malley
Published on
Company
Quickboost
Scale
1/72
MSRP
$5.00

This is another fine set of replacement details form Quickboost, this set for the Tamiya 1/72 Ilyshin IL-2 Shturmovik. The details include replacement gun barrels and pitot tube.

The Tamiya kit details are nice, but the Quickboost details are more refined and have no flash. The gun barrels and pitot tube are thinner than the Tamiya parts and don’t require any cleanup other than removal from the casting block.

The Quickboost details will add nicely refined detail to the Tamiya kit and are a great value for a low price.

Thanks to Quickboost for their continued support of the IPMS review program and for providing the review sample. Thanks also to the great IPMS review staff for letting me review the details.

Review Author
Bill O'Malley
Published on
Company
Hauler
Scale
1/87
MSRP
$6.00

This is a resin kit of a 1956 vintage BMW motorcycle in 1/87 scale (HO train scale). Kit comes in 22 gray resin pieces and two photoetch pieces.

The frame pieces E & F are cast within a casting ring completely surrounded by flash. Hauler suggests an interesting method to remove the flash by placing the parts on a piece of sandpaper and sanding off the flash. It worked pretty well and left the very delicate parts fairly clean without breakage.

Some of the flashing around the parts is fairly thick considering how small the parts are.

The front and rear tires use imaginary spokes as the hubs hang in the middle of the wheel. There are two photoetch handlebar pieces supplied so I assume they needed to be glued together and that’s what I did. The kit goes together really well considering how small the pieces are and has nice detail for a small kit.

I painted the model with some gloss black, flat black, aluminum, and chrome paint.

Review Author
Rick Bellanger
Published on
Company
Eduard
Scale
1/32
MSRP
$15.00

Eduard has done it again. This time, releasing an outstanding resin super detail kit to add to their long list of other detail parts for the HK Model kit of the B-17. Included in this set are four resin highly detailed superchargers and two exhaust pipes to replace the existing models parts. The superchargers are designed to be direct replacement part, so no modification to the kit is required. The only cutting that is needed is to remove the exhaust header coming from the engine cowling and attach this to the superchargers. Remember measure twice and then again before you cut. The instructions are very good in showing what and where the cuts are required.

The only hard part in the kit that I found was to remove the casting carriers from the parts. I use a four inch bench mounted belt sander to quickly remove most of the carrier, then fine tune with a little whittling with the razor knife. It’s ok to mess up a little, it will not be seen when they are installed.

Review Author
Tom Pope
Published on
Company
Moebius Models
Scale
1/32
MSRP
$29.99

Introduction

Many stories have been told in science fiction of man’s development of artificial intelligence and the subsequent enslavement of man by the machines he created. One such story was Battlestar Galactica (BSG) which first aired on ABC television in 1978. Mankind had created an army of automatons known as Cylons to protect and serve them but the Cylons evolved a sense of purpose of their own, destroying the human civilization and chasing the last few thousand human survivors into deep space and forcing them to search for a new home - Earth. In 2004, a darker and more sinister Battlestar Galactica was reimagined as a miniseries on the SyFy Channel.

Over the last few years, Moebius Models has developed several great and accurate model kits devoted to the new Battlestar Galactica series but in late 2013, Moebius released a 1/32nd scale Colonial Viper kit, one of several new kits released to commemorate the 35th Anniversary of the original TV series.