Since I had picked up Bronco’s lovely little 40mm Bofors gun, I jumped at the chance to review the separate Gun Crew set. Unfortunately for me, they are dressed in more European Theatre uniforms (and possibly early war) while I plan to make my gun one based on Malta, so hopefully Bronco will do a Middle Eastern uniformed crew set in the near future.

That said, let’s take a look in the box and see what we got. There are 6 figures in the kit, which seems a pretty standard crew for the gun, but it could go up to 8 men.

The figures come in 8-11 parts including helmets and gas mask bags. While I have seen a few pictures of crews wearing the gas mask bags, most of the shots I have seen show the crews without these. This wouldn’t be an issue except the straps for the bags are molded to the torsos of the 5 crew members with bags, so some shaving would be required to remove these.

With the release of the Eduard Mig-21 family and the upgrades to the older Academy Mig-29 and Su-27, as well as the reboxed Su-25 and Su-22s, it is amazing that it has taken this long to get a decent 1/48th scale pilot for these airplanes. If you are like me, I enjoy having a figure next to my airplane for scale comparison. Well, now I can do that with my Russian jets. Yes, I know, you are saying, “Floyd builds jets? And Russian ones at that?” Well, I haven’t yet, but I have all of them, so when I get that itch I can scratch it.

This figure is molded in two pieces of light grey resin that have no flaws that I can see. Aero Line posed the figure with his arm up shielding the sun while watching something in the sky. I like the pose and it seems natural. The biggest piece of resin is the whole pilot with very little cleanup required. The only other part is the arm, which is keyed to go into the body and should represent no big hassle in assembly.

1/48 model builders now have a way to include a Japanese Road Roller in their WWII Japanese aircraft dioramas or to display as an unique stand-alone subject. Belcher Bits offers a mixed media kit of the IJN road roller that U.S. Marines found on the unfinished airfield construction site when they landed on Guadalcanal in 1942 and captured what would later be named Henderson Field. The kit is packaged in a zip-lock bag and includes 14 cast resin parts, four metal parts, and five pieces of styrene strip and channel stock. The resin parts are well detailed, generally free of pinholes, and remarkably tolerant of flexing. Casting blocks are minimal and easy to remove with an X-acto blade or saw. A folded instruction sheet tells you how long to cut the styrene pieces and where to attach them and the metal bits.

Moebius has been making a name for itself with repops of some old Aurora figure kits mixed in with new kits in the same style. Green Lantern is one of the latter. This 18 piece kit represents him in flying mode, holding down a robot using the power of his ring. The pose is very dynamic. For those of you who don’t follow Green Lantern (got to admit I am one of these), this version represents Hal Jordan, a test pilot who gets selected by the Guardians of the Universe to be the first human Green Lantern. The rest of the data you can read on the instruction sheet or the internet.

The set had very minimal flash and no ejection pin marks. The few mold lines that exist were easily removed with a sharp blade. There are decals and painting instructions. The decals were a pleasant surprise. Now all the small details like shoulder patches and campaign ribbons are better shown.

The figures went together okay, but the Horricks figure has the hands and arms molded in one piece and that created a gap in the shoulder attachment that required some additional effort to close up. Colors are called out in Hobby Color, Mr. Hobby, Humbrol, and Tamiya paints.

Conclusion – Riich Models is a new company and is off to a decent start in 1/35 scale figures. The figures depict a section of a period photo taken of them. The action is very minimal, however. Since there is nothing else showing in the picture, I would add a British tank or some other vehicle to make a nice little diorama. The kit is well done and appears better than my figure painting makes it look.