Thanks to Aires for providing more of their excellent aftermarket parts for IPMS USA to review, and to IPMS leadership for sending it my way.

This aftermarket set item replaces the kit ejection seat in any F-104A to C. It is not complex, but does require some vision assistance and gentle skills in the sheet-metalworking department.

This set contains seven extremely-detailed, hard gray resin parts - the entire seat in one cast piece, with two separate foot plates, one ejection initiator handle, two ejection net extension arms, and a buckle fitting; one soft, flexible resin hose, and a fret of photoetch for the harness and fittings. First step is to spray all the gray resin and metal photoetch resin parts with primer. I used my favored primer, Tamiya Gray in a rattle can.

Scale Aircraft Conversions is known for making replacement landing gear for a wide variety of kits in virtually every scale in which model aircraft are available. This set is designed to replace the plastic gear in the Wolfpack T-2C Buckeye kit.

The set includes both main gear legs with their retraction struts, and the nose gear made in one piece with the nose wheel. The struts are very sturdy and are made to be drop-in replacements for the kit parts. The parts require very little clean up, though some parts do occasionally become a bit bent during shipping. No worries there, though, since they are very easily straightened.

Recommended, especially if you’re adding a bit of weight to make sure your Buckeye isn’t a tail sitter. Thanks to Scale Aircraft Conversions for the review sample and to IPMS/USA for the opportunity to review it.

The MiG-17 is a subsonic fighter aircraft developed by the Soviet Union as a follow-on to the very successful MiG-15. The MiG-17 was flown by numerous air forces around the world and several countries, such as Poland were licensed to build MiG-17s.

The book focuses on the various MiG-17 variants operated by the Polish Air Force from 1955 onward. While the initial batch of MiG-17F and MiG-17PF aircraft operated by the Polish Air Force were purchased from the Soviet Union, the majority of the aircraft it used were actually built by Polish industry under a license obtained from the Soviet Union. The license-built aircraft were designated Lim-5 (fighter/interceptor) or Lim-6 (fighter-bomber) and there were a number of variants of each which were differentiated by letter suffixes to the designation.