The USS Saratoga was the US Navy's third aircraft carrier, being commissioned a few months prior to its class-lead, USS Lexington CV 2, in November 1927. USS Langley CV 1, Lexington, and Saratoga were instrumental in developing a new generation of fleet tactics that embraced the capabilities of airpower.

Eduard has put together a really nice set of details for the USS Saratoga CV-3 Trumpeter kit. You get 2 sheets of PE that provide a lot of details that are not in the original kit, along with six pages of instructions to help you apply the parts to your kit. The details include upgrades for the turrets and island, upper deck safety rails & nets, stairway guide rails, and ladders. The set also comes with parts to upgrade the deck crane and the plane catcher net.

The PE parts are perfectly etched and can be easily cut from the trees without special tools.

Quickboost has now added resin exhaust pipes specifically for the Zvezda 1/48 kit of the Bf-109F to their line. As with all their releases, this is meant to be a drop-fit replacement, so there are several 1/48 Bf-109F exhausts now available from Quickboost, each designed to fit a specific kit.

The Zvezda kit of the 109 differs from other manufacturers’ releases in that it includes a full engine (among other details) and has individual exhaust stubs. So the Quickboost exhaust designed for any other kit (molded as a single bank of stubs) certainly would not ‘drop-fit’ into a Zvezda model.

One of Quickboost’s latest products is this set of three 1/48th scale headrests for the F6F Hellcat. Although the recommended kit is Eduard’s, I’m sure this would easily work on Hasegawa’s kit or even the old Arii/Otaki (or even the Monogram if you are feeling adventurous or nostalgic!).

As best I can determine, the middle headrest on this set (with the narrower width) was for use in the -3 (and early -5) Hellcats that carried the small windows aft of the pilot. The other two headrests without this narrower section are identical except for the size of the headrest padding.

The molding is very crisp and in a grey/green colored resin. The accompanying drawing of the set, along with photos on the web, shows that a vertical ‘bar’ should be present on the sides of the pour stub, presumably to offer some protection to the pieces. These bars were missing on my copy, but the headrests themselves were in perfect shape.