History

For those of us who've learned to fly, there's nothing like the first time you line up with the runway and apply full take off power. You race down the runway till you feel the wing start to do its magic. With a slight backward pull of the wheel, your flying! Likewise, the aircraft you learn to fly in stays with you the rest of your life. The Cessna 150 has filled that place for thousands of fledgling pilots since its introduction in 1959. When production ended in 1985, 23,948 Cessna 150s had been built. A simple two place design that includes a small back seat (for very small children) the 150 can haul a useful load of 500 pounds at 108 Kts with the Continental O-200s, 100 HP pulling it along. Design changes over the years included a redesigned rear fuselage incorporating a rear window and modifying the vertical tail from straight to raked back. This kit represents a later model 150. Remarkably, over 2/3 of all Cessna 150s built are still flying.

Ultracast is based in Canada, and have been around quite a while, providing excellent resin cast items for the AMS modelers among us… With that, extreme thanks to our friends at Ultracast for providing these excellent castings to us, and thanks to the IPMS leadership for sending them to me for review!

These are simple replacement items for the Tamiya wheel and tire sets in their Mosquito kits. I have assembled one of each, one from the Ultracast range, and the Tamiya kit items side by side.

What first strikes me are the small details; the air inflation stem on the outer portion of the wheel, the increased depth of the Spoke area, and the excellent tread pattern that makes up the tire. And no seam filling! The tire tread in particular is better defined than the kit items.

Background

After the success of the Halberstadt CL.II as a durable ground attack plane and effective escort for bombers and German recon planes, the decision was made to design an improved version. That improved design resulted in the Halberstadt CL.IV which started arriving at the front in the summer of 1918. The plane was produced by the parent company, as well as two production batches under license to LFG Roland. These Roland produced CL.IV’s had their fuselage extended by 0.4 m to stabilize the aircraft’s level flight. The craft quickly gained the reputation as one of the best ground attack aircraft in all of the Great War. The CL.IV performed exceptionally well in low-level, ground-strafing flying while demonstrating good maneuverability in avoiding ground fire.