Round 2 reissued the vintage Owens Deluxe Cruiser kit. When building you need to bear in mind that this kit and molds are over 50 years old, and it shows. The flash is so bad on some sprues that it’s difficult to locate the actual part(s). Nothing fits together tightly without some serious massaging to the parts to be joined.

The instruction sheet is a very basic affair that had me thinking quite a few times as to part placement.

The Owens Deluxe Cruiser is the first boat I’ve built since way, way back when I built the Robert E. Lee paddle wheeler when I was a kid, so this is totally out of my realm. Now I have to build a trailer and then a vehicle to haul to and from the water.

Patience is the key to the build. Test fit, refit and sand as needed and you can have a nice looking kit but expect it to take extra work due to the age of the kits molds.

Thank you to Round2 for reissuing this kit and thank you to IPMS for allowing me to review the kit.

The book goes into details of the formation, deployment and combat actions of the Panzergrenadier Division “Brandenburg” on the eastern front on the last few months of World War Two. The hardback book comes with a companion book of all the campaign maps with corresponding references to the book pages and chapters.

This is the first book to take a deep look at the famous Panzergrenadier-Division 'Brandenburg' from its formation and its five-month campaign in the Eastern Front at the end of the Second World War.

'Brandenburg' was created in December 1944 from several burnt-out commando regiments and the remnants of a few conventional units supplied by the Ersatzheer.

The unit fought in some of the most dramatic and relatively unknown late war battles in Poland, Silesia, Saxony, and Czechoslovakia. The book has been created by using many never before published accounts by soldiers who were with the unit in the final months of the war.

Like many limited-run model companies, Fly Models’ first kits were fairly small. I had the distinct pleasure of building one of their Ba-349 Natters when they first came out, and was impressed by the level of effort expended on this design by this fledgling company. It’s still one of the prides of my collection.