For those of us who love nothing better than trying to figure out where all of those flying wires go to and how to attach them, New Zealand’s Wingnut Wings has been a blessing and the best thing that has happened to our hobby in many years. 1/32^ndscale is a fantastic scale for WWI aircraft, yet they don’t take up a lot of display room. The quality of the Wingnut Wings’ releases is still hard to digest, especially at their very reasonable price and free shipping, to boot. To complement their fantastic kits, they have now started releasing some equally stunning decals, all of which are printed in Italy by Cartograf. The registry is without fault; they are thin, and Wingnut Wings even recommends that a hair dryer be used to get their decals to conform to the model’s surface, instead of setting solutions. Amazingly, it works. Why, I don’t know, but there’s no cleanup afterwards.

If you have a passion for WWI aircraft this is the magazine for you. In this installment Lance Krieg walks us thru scratch building wings in the Harry Woodman approach where the wing core is cut and shaped from either balsa or basswood or even plastic stock and is then covered with a plastic skin. The process is thoroughly covered in five pages with 42 photos showing wing fabrication as well as the aft flying surfaces. Variants to the Woodman approach are also considered and shown as well, very useful addition to one’s knowledge that may be of use later.

In going through all of my references on the Skyraider, I found pictures of at least three types of 20mm cannon barrels. I guess it’s another one of those cases where you have to have pictures of the exact aircraft you are modeling; to be sure you get it right. The castings are very well done, very sleek and very fragile. They are one-to-one replacements for the barrels on the Hasegawa kit. Just glue the wing halves together, snip off the kit barrels and drill a hole in the leading edge, and you’re ready to go. If you are depicting a step-down barrel, this is the way to go, because you just won’t find any thin walled tubing that will give you that nice of a step-down. The pitot tube is very thin and very fragile. And, of course, the quality of the casting of Quickboost detail parts is great.

My thanks to Aires for the review sample and to IPMS/USA for letting me do the review.