I’ve always had a thing for World War 1 armor. Or perhaps I should say I was into World War One before it was cool. What this means is that for the longest time, if I wanted something in this scale, I had to make it myself. Later, Emhar released a series of lozenge tanks which, although extremely crude, gave you the basic shapes to do something with if you had the skills and inclination. Over time I’ve happily made every kit they issued, and spent hours improving them to reasonable standards.
Scale Aircraft Conversions has produced replacement gear for the new Academy release of their 1/72 scale F-4 Phantom kit. The white metal replacements are a clean drop-in for the kit plastic parts. The supplied items include two main gear struts and braces, and one nose gear strut with a separate oleo scissor and retraction strut. Some other SAC packages include replacement wheels, as well, but not the case here. You will need to use the Academy wheels for your build.
A side by side evaluation (see photos) indicates an identical replacement that should provide a greater strength assembly with a significantly improved weight capacity and abuse tolerance. In some cases where original equipment was left in a natural metal finish, painting may not be necessary. As always, check your reference photos
Highly recommended.
Thanks to the IPMS Reviewer Corps and Scale Aircraft Conversions for the opportunity to review this item.
Res-Im (Resin Improvement) is a Czech company that specialized in resin detail sets, mainly in the 1/48 and 1/72 scales.
This set is for the Hawker Hurricane Mk.I gun bay, for the 4 guns wing. Inside a sturdy box you get a total of 18 resin pours for a two full gun bays –starboard and port wings-. The parts are extremely delicate and in some cases there is a very thin resin layer covering a hole or an opening that might need to be cleaned with a sharp blade before installation.
The pours are in a light grey-green resin and the resin itself is a tad brittle. I accidentally broke off a very thin part from the pouring slab (but the part itself was undamaged). My pictures don’t show repeated/duplicates resin pours.
The Polish Air Force during WWII fought in many fronts, under many different camouflage schemes and with a very large variety of aircraft.
This book covers the Polish Air Force, as an autonomous force in Poland, during 1939, and as an independent Air Force, integrated for operations with the French Air Force (1940) and the RAF mainly for the period 1940-1943.
For each main section –as described above- there is a chapter that describes the general strategic and tactical situation, the overall organization and coordination with French and British Air Forces, plus some high level description of the combat roles.
There is another chapter devoted to the general details of camouflage colors, scheme and markings, and later there are specific chapters for each airframe flown by Polish pilots.
This is my first Great Wall Hobby kits and I was very curious to see if they are as good as I have read. Well from the moment I held the box you can see the box is high quality and that was just a taste of what was come. The kit inside the box looked great and very well molded and a super finish.
This is a kit of an early production version of the T-33A Shooting star and comes with markings to build a US, German and Spanish Air force machine
In the box is:
- 10 x light grey sprues
- 1 clear Sprue
- 1 decal sheet
- 1 instruction booklet
- 1 revision instruction sheet (corrections to the instruction sheet)
All the sprues are extremely well molded and great detail; the instruction booklet is a fold out type and has a loose front sheet showing the Sprues