If you are like me, you like to articulate your elevators but you are never happy with the way it comes out. Well Quickboost makes that a whole lot easier. This set has four light tan resin pieces which replace the kit horizontal stabilizer and elevators. The trailing edges of the stabilizer are thinned and have a concaved area that the elevators, which are rounded on the leading edge, will slot into. The Tamiya kit is a really nice looking kit and this set will just make it that much nicer. It is up to the modeler to position the elevator as they wish. Don’t forget to offset the control stick.

Highly recommended

Thanks to Quickboost, Aires Hobby Models and IPMS/USA for the review copy.

Quickboost just keeps adding to their line of resin aircraft accessories. The latest addition is for the Hasegawa Ta 154. It is up to their usual standards; molded in grey resin, smooth, seamless and bubble free. One thing of note is that they are really easy to remove from the mold block because of a nice perforation. It only took me a couple of minutes with my saw blade to remove them. Another plus is that the exhausts are bored out, which would be a real pain if you tried to do it on the kit part.

The exhausts that come in the Hasegawa kit look alright and would make an acceptable model but the Quickboost replacements are superior because of how they are bored out which makes for more realism, especially in a photo. These exhausts are very easy to install, and they just fit right in.

The first order of business: Extreme thanks to Squadron Mail order/MMD for providing IPMS/USA yet another review item. These folks are one of the oldest and most well-known plastic model kit distributors in the world, and we appreciate their providing us with review items!

This sheet highlights one of my favorite aircraft; the “Aardvark”, or F-111. Designed for use on the new Hobbyboss kits, it would be equally at home on the Academy versions.

The markings on this sheet are for three aircraft of a unit that I used to track while assigned to 17^th AF in Sembach, Germany; the 20^th FW from Upper Heyford in the UK. They used to fly down and “practice bomb” us on occasion… quite a “free” airshow, and guaranteed to soil your pants if you didn’t see them coming in full afterburner.

I'm a big Spitfire fan and I was really excited to review this new item from 3D-Kits. The decal sheet provides marking for four Spitfires. You get two identical sprues containing all the parts needed to convert two Spitfire Mk I's to Mk II standards. This set reminds me of the old Airform conversion set for 1/72 Spitfires from the mid-seventies, but much better. The parts are flash free and very nicely molded. A new seat, control column, Rotol propeller, blunt spinner and teardrop shaped Coffman starter fairing complete the conversion parts. This conversion is intended for Airfix (old and new tool), and Tamiya Spitfire kits. Although it may also fit the aging Hasegawa, Heller, and Revell kits as well (I don't have these kits handy and could not verify). The new parts are direct replacements for kit parts. However I found that the new seat will require a little adjustment to fit the Airfix kit to get an acceptable result. The decals options are as follows:

Classic Airframes created quite a stir when they released their TA-4J in 1/48 scale. At long last, decal manufactures had a great excuse to make some of the very colorful markings found on the two-seat Skyhawk! Afterburner Decals wasted no time, and quickly released this sheet. Now, we all know that Hasegawa very soon after released their version of the TA-4J, but fear not as even though this sheet was printed for the Classic Airframes kit, they fit the Hasegawa kit just fine. For those that have noticed, the Classic Airframes kit looks to be a modification of the Hasegawa A-4 kit, thus both TA-4J kits are virtually identical in size and shape. In fact, for this review, I used a Hasegawa kit.