During the 1950’s, Boeing Aircraft Company (BO) teamed up with the Michigan Aeronautical Research Center (MARC) to create the U.S. Air Force’s first nuclear-armed surface-to-air missile. Combining both entities and shortening Boeing created the name of the new missile – BOMARC.

Revell has reissued its classic kit of the IM-99 BOMARC missile. This kit dates back to 1958, and has some features common to that era, such as operating parts and oversized “rivets”. In this case, the missile launch rail moves up and down, and the nose clamps on the rail open and close. Considering the age of the kit, the fit of the parts was pretty good, with very little putty and sanding needed after assembly. However, there is a moderate amount of flash on many parts.

Eduard has issued a four-bladed resin propeller to upgrade the propeller in their SE.5a kit. The upgraded propeller includes resin and photoetch parts with much finer detail than the kit propeller.

The Royal Aircraft Factory SE.5 was introduced in 1917 with a 150 HP V8 Hispano-Suiza 8A engine with two-bladed counter-clockwise (left) rotating propeller. The SE.5a was an improved version of the SE.5 and was one of the fastest fighters of WWI. The SE.5a aircraft was originally produced with a 200 HP Hispano-Suiza 8B gear-driven engine (‘Hisso’), with a counter-clockwise (left) rotating four-bladed propeller. The gear-driven engines proved unreliable, and were quickly replaced with the 200 HP Wolsely Viper direct drive engine with clockwise rotating (right) two-bladed propeller.

Master Model of Poland produces small brass parts for detailing models, be they aircraft or ships. They have parts for aircraft in 1/32, 1/35, 1/48, 1/72, and 1/144, mostly pitot tubes, refueling probes, and gun barrels.

This “add-on” is a single pitot tube. It’s very fine turned brass. The detail is so fine that I had to use my magnifiers to determine that there are three different diameters on the pitot, getting smaller at about 1/3 and 2/3 of the length.

The instructions are to the point:

• Remove the kit pitot from the mount.
• Drill a hole in the mount.
• Glue the new pitot in the hole using CA
• Put the mount under the F-100’s intake.

I was able to skip step 4, as the kit pitot was already mounted under the nose.

Shortly after Trumpeter released its new Su-33 Flanker D kit, Scale Aircraft Conversions released a replacement set for the kit landing gear. The set is comprised of five parts: two main landing gear legs, the nose strut, the nose strut retraction actuator, and the scissor link for the nose gear strut.

As with Scale Aircraft’s other sets, the parts are drop in replacements for the kit parts. After removing a slight molding seam on the parts, I polished them using a wire wheel in my battery operated Dremel tool at low speed. This works very well and results in a nice uniform finish to all of the parts.

These are Eduard’s brass photoetch cable anchors for their new SE.5a kits. Eduard refers to them as stretchers, but they are simple anchors without any kind of turnbuckle or way to tighten cables. The package includes both single and double anchor points for the double wires on the SE.5a. Eduard supplies way more pieces than are actually required for the aircraft to make up for all of those that will be lost. The anchor point holes on the wings will need to be drilled out deeper for the length of the anchor, which will then fit neatly. The stretchers for 1/48 scale are extremely small.