Thank you to Mr. Neil Yan of HK Models and the IPMS Reviewer Corps for the opportunity to review a wonderful new model release in large-scale aircraft. This next installment is fairly brief and describes the construction of the nose section and the remainder of the fuselage.
This is a very small item when assembled, as the photographs will show. The model is composed of four parts: the body of the indicator, cast in a slick, red plastic; a bezel made from thin steel similar to a photo etch part; the wind vane assembly which appears to me to be of plastic or resin; and two identical instrument dials printed in black on a thin plastic sheet coated with what appears to be white paint.
The instructions are on the reverse of the packaging sheet and show all of the parts painted, prepared and ready to go. The resulting photographs show an extremely detailed and precise completed wind powered indicator. However, reality does not meet up with advertising in this instance.
When Moebius announced a kit of the “Creature from the Black Lagoon with Victim”, I was excited. I have always been a fan of the 1954 movie creature, story and Julie Adams. It got even better when they announced Adam Dougherty, the "Kreature Kid". It was a wonderful day when Review package arrived in the mail. Out came the DVD and straight to the basement.
I broke the kit down into three builds- the creature, the girl, and the base. The kit comes with an excellent sandy base with lizard, fossil hand, stones and a nice tropical fern.
Hasegawa’s 1/48th scale J-35 Draken kit is an excellent representation of the plane. Like most injected kits, the ejection seat is not as good as the rest of the kit due to molding limitations. Now Quickboost comes to the rescue with a highly detailed resin Saab ejection seat with molded belts.
I have enclosed pictures of the Quickboost seat as well as Aires seat and the kit seat. Aires has a set of PE seat belts that need to be built prior to installing the seat, Quickboost's belts are molded onto the seat and the kit seat has no belts at all. The Aires and Quickboost seat are similar with excellent detail on the fabric and seat. The Aires seat comes with an entire replacement cockpit.
It's amazing to me how many of the kits that were not around at all are actually being produced now. One of the companies coming out with a great selection of kits is Kinetic and their S2F Tracker is a lovely kit with options for wing folds and nicely engraved panel lines. One small deficiency of the kit is that it ignored the engine exhausts which are above and below the wings on the nacelles. For a lot of modelers, this is no big deal and the kit still is wonderful. View the images in the slideshow which clearly illustrate the location of the exhausts, with arrows indicating where they should go.
Installation is easy. I used a small drill bit to open the holes and then refined them with files and a knife. Once the holes have been opened and cleaned up, the exhausts were added. Total time, to open the holes and satisfactorily test fit the exhausts was about 15 minutes. This is a great addition to a great kit and would be a great start to weathering the Tracker.
The HMS Warspite was one of the Queen Elizabeth class dreadnaughts launched during the First World War. These were the state of the art battleships of the time and the general soundness of their design shows in the fact that the last of them was not disposed of until the 1950's! They went through many refits that changed their appearance quite a bit over the years. The WWII Warspite has been modeled several times in several scales, most recently in the newly popular 1/350, but never in her WWI fit. The Trumpeter kit is of her appearance when she was launched, thus she joins a very small group of injection kits of WWI ships and I believe the only one as she was during that war. As I build ship models very slowly, this will be a two-part review. This first will be an in the box review and the second will be an actual build. Now, let's open the box and see what we have.
Hobbyboss has an excellent series of hits coming, and their line of F3H Demon kits is most welcomed with their foldable wings and engraved lines.
Like most modern planes, the kit suffers from the ability to do a really good ejection seat. Quickboost gives modelers an option with a perfectly cast five piece seat with molded seat belts. The seat comes with the main body, headrest, center stick and two loops for the sides of the seat. This is an early seat, those early seats being replaced by the MB series.
Assembly is straightforward after removing the parts from the mold block. Notice in the comparison pictures that the kit parts do have some large ejector pin marks and that there are no seat belts. The Quickboost seat is a direct drop in and much better in shape and accuracy. This is the kind of resin I love- large improvement, low cost and easy to use.
Platz has added to their stable of excellent kits with its issue of the Curtiss C-46D, in their JASDF series. The size of the real aircraft means that even in 1/144 scale, this is a pretty good-size model and doesn’t require micro-surgery to work on. The kit’s molded in light gray plastic with beautifully engraved panel lines and detail.
This HO scale rendition of Mel’s Drive-In from the movie, American Graffiti, comes with a colorful and attractive box art. It’s a multi-media kit, with the exterior structure in plastic, but with the interior supplied on pre-printed card stock. The instructions are easy to follow and consist of 7 steps.
The suggested colors are listed, but are basic, such as white, grey, and brick red. After a little online research I found an interior shot which I used for reference. The research indicated that the diner had a black and white floor. I simulated this by painting the floor white, then using black decal trim film for the tiles.
Ships are not something I normally model but I jumped at the chance to review this submarine. It is by a new company from Hong Kong and if this kit is a sample of things to come, I am surely looking forward to their future releases.
To begin with, I was thinking 1/700 or 1/350 scale when I asked to review this kit. It is in 1/200 scale and is rather long, 19 inches to be exact. The packaging is in a large sturdy box and the parts are molded in light grey plastic on 5 sprues. There is one sprue of clear parts for the OS2U-3 Kingfisher and two in black for the base.
