Dave Steingass
Reviews By Author
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Tales from the Apocalypse, The WaitressPublished:
I’ve never met a Japanese kit that wasn’t top-quality, and the Tales From The Apocalypse series from Gecco Models is no exception. This series of figures carries a 1980s-era B-Movie Horror theme. In what may be the most brilliant packaging of any models I’ve ever seen, these figures are packaged in look-alike VHS tape boxes. Number 5 in the series, is a Diner waitress, wearing a Blue Dress, white smock, and pink Chuck Taylors. Like the Traffic guard, she has recently experienced some trauma. A broken arm, multiple leg wounds, and a gouged out right eye and a machete seems to have hacked her neck. She is carrying a very gruesome Blue-plate Special of severed arms. Tasty. The kit is made of high-quality styrene with virtually zero mild lines or flash. The Pen she… more |
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Tales from the Apocalypse, The Traffic GuardPublished:
I’ve never met a Japanese kit that wasn’t top-quality, and the Tales From The Apocalypse series from Gecco Models is no exception. This series of figures carries a 1980s-era B-Movie Horror theme. In what may be the most brilliant packaging of any models I’ve ever seen, these figures are packaged in look-alike VHS tape boxes. Number 3 in the series, is a traffic guard/Street Worker, wearing a reflective safety vest, hardhat, carrying a Stop Sign, and sporting a particularly nasty back trauma wound. He has had several limbs broken and twisted in whatever horrible accident occurred to him earlier in the day. The kit comes with multiple left arms, I’ve chosen the one dragging the stop sign, as this reflects a “fresh” zombie in my pop-culture addled brain. The kit is… more |
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Soviet Small Arms WW2Published:
Most of the time, Figures in small scales, such as HO (1:87) are armed with weapons that roughly represent their 1:1 scale real-world counterparts at best, and more often than not, look like sticks or worse. If you have any 1:87 scale WW2-era Soviet troops that need improved weapons, this is for you. The kit is composed of 1 sheet of photo-etched brass, containing 10 WW2-era Soviet Small Arms, and 1 instruction sheet The small arms are very highly detailed, historically accurate, and are folded in half to represent both 3D sides of the weapon. Iron sights and bolt-action levers, as well as magazines, and even triggers and trigger-guards are represented very well on the models. As seen in the picture below, I have assembled the Mosin-Nagant standard… more |
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WelderPublished:
I started out with this small, bagged resin and Photo-Etched brass kit, thinking it would be a quick, enjoyable build. What I found was much more complicated. The kit consists of 1 Photo-Etched Brass sheet containing the Acetylene Torch/Welding cart and two different welding guns, depending on your preference, and 1 resin sprue consisting of the welder figure, two spoked wheels, two very fragile axles, and the gas tanks. Initially, the parts removal and flash cleanup are fairly easy, however, this is in 1/87 scale (HO), so everything is very small as seen in this photo with needle nose pliers and #11 Xacto blade for scale. Up until this point, the build went relatively well, bending the cart into shape, and fitting the axle and wheels to the cart. However, My… more |
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Ruined Factory with BasePublished:
Once again, I’ve chosen MiniArt’s 1/35 diorama series for my conversion project. Like the other kits in this line, the walls and base are thin vacuformed styrene. The air ductwork is also vacuformed in halves, like the walls. This requires a lot of putty-work to clean up the gaps as usual, so I do not recommend this kit to beginner modelers. However, despite the extra modeling work required for these kits, the results can be very rewarding. I used half a tube of Squadron Green Putty on this kit, and the putty and sanding took longer on the ductwork than the walls. As in my previous reviews, I’ve changed the scale to fit the heroic 28mm scale of the Warhammer 40,000 Sci-Fi universe. It is an Authoritarian empire of mankind besieged on all sides in a grim, dark future of endless… more |
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Railway StationPublished:
MiniArt is quickly becoming one of my favorite companies to review products from. Now MiniArt has released a new line of 1/72 scale kits. This is the first major release from this new line. For HO scale railroaders and 1/72 wargamers, this new system of modular brick wall structures will be a nice addition. The kit comes molded in several colors, all of which are moot if you are going to paint the model, but it could be assembled without paint and look decent. There was a major problem with inaccurate printed instructions being shipped with the first releases of this kit. At first I thought I didn’t have enough sprues in the kit, but MRC quickly provided me with revised instructions and a replacement kit, since I had already glued walls beyond reasonable repair. The… more |
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Office FurniturePublished:
Plusmodel is one of my new favorite model companies from the Czech Republic. This kit consists of 50 parts which completely surprised me with the thinness and extreme quality of the resin castings. Every part was cast perfectly – no bubbles, warping, or unsightly defects in any way. These are all signs of a well-thought out casting process. The furniture built extremely easily; all the parts fit together with little to no trimming or sanding. I wanted to go the extra mile, however, and experimented with India Inks for the wood grain. There is no wood grain texture on the parts – what you see is done entirely with paint and ink. I added a 1:35 gangster figure from another great resin company, Evolution Miniatures, from Brazil. I scratchbuilt the diorama entirely from plastic,… more |
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Cylon CenturionPublished:
This is the latest in large-scale figure kits from Moebius Models. Parts number is actually unknown (I forgot to count and it isn't listed on the box), but it consists of 13 sprues molded in light grey and the clear eye lens. The instruction manual is styled after printouts in the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica series with the cropped corners, rounding out this excellent kit from fans, for fans. The kit is well-detailed, and assembly is not a problem for advanced modelers. However, there are a few transposed part numbers in the instructions that could cause some confusion for an intermediate modeler. It is important to keep the parts for the right and left limbs separate, since the pose is static. The pose could be changed with a bit of cutting and pinning, but I did… more |
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WorkshopPublished:
MiniArt has released a huge number of diorama and scenic kits, all designed with the scratchbuilder and kitbasher in mind. This kit is a simple unreinforced brick workshop, suitable for almost any era or location in the world that has used this type of construction technique. I have kitbashed this into a two-story custom building and changed the scale of the model closer to 1:48 (a.k.a., O Scale or 28mm for Wargaming). This kit consists of 140 parts – vacuformed styrene brick and roof components molded in metallic grey, and the usual high quality injection-molded styrene accessory sprues molded in light grey. All vacuformed kits have flash that needs removed. The vacuformed walls are two parts each that need to be cut out of the sheet and joined together along the… more |
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Old RadiosPublished:
This review is for Plus Models Old Radios set in their "Easy Line" product range. The kit consists of three resin cast radios from different decades of the first half of the 20th Century. These are just simply washed with soap and water to remove the mold-release agent and then painted appropriately with Vallejo and Citadel acrylics. The radios need to be snipped from their resin runner/sprue; there was no flash, warpage, or air bubbles observed. Many thanks to IPMS-USA and Plus Models for the review sample. |