First Impression

ICM Holding, a Ukrainian-based company known for outstanding quality, has produced excellent figure kit with this brand-new tooling release of a Roman Centurion from the 1^st Century. The box contains one bag containing two gray sprues and a separate black sprue (and bag) for the base. The kit contains a total of 49 parts. The parts are crisply molded and engraved; the detail is outstanding and all parts are flash free. The double-sided assembly guide combines the assembly and painting guidelines.

One very impressive aspect of this kit is that fact that the arms and legs are solid molds and you will not have to worry about filling lots of seems as is typical with many plastic figure kits. In my view, this kit is so close in quality to resin figure models that I believe many in the figure modeling community will really enjoy this model kit.

A very nice bonus is a full-color frameable art print (matching the box art).

The Kit and Assembly

The kit consists of 23 gray resin parts, 3 injection molded plastic rotor blades, and two sheets of photo etch metal, altogether containing approximately 50 parts, of varying size and complexity. None of the parts is named, but most are identifiable. One thing to remember is that this is not a kit designed for beginners, and wondered while I was assembling the kit whether it was really intended for experienced modelers. There are a LOT of parts to this kit, especially considering its size, and you will have to be very careful cutting the PE parts off of the sheet, as they will do their best to escape. Some are so small that if some reason they should become lost, they will be gone forever. Use of a magnifying glass is highly recommended, both for assembly and for looking for parts on the floor.

This Master Model set provides a huge leap over any of the injected molded parts available on any 1/32 kit. The older kits, being vacuform kits, didn’t even include a pitot tube. The modern injection kit that does offer a pitot tube is clearly not on par due to the limits of injection modeling.

Notable is the thin re-sealable pouches that Master Model uses that makes the parts easy to review and then stuff back into the re-sealable package securely. You will want to be careful handling this brass part due to its small size, it makes it an easy sacrifice to the carpet monster. Another caveat is that the point is really thin and can be accidently bent. I’ve had this happen on one pitot in 1/144 scale, but not to worry, it can be fixed. Placing the pitot tube in between a smooth flat set of tweezers will straighten out the tip. Just be extremely gentle so you don't break off the tip when you gently roll it so that it is straight once again.

This issue of the weathering magazine is devoted to the color green. I found this extremely interesting because so many military vehicles are green as well as many other interesting subjects to model. The problem I have always noticed with models that are green or any other single color for that matter is they can be very monochromatic or otherwise kind of boring. But with the technics in this magazine you can transform your monochromatic subject into an interest and spectacular build to look at that will be anything but boring.

There are several different types of articles in the book from various authors showing there weathering technics on green vehicles and are as follows:

Recently I had the pleasure of tackling ICM’s new Gloster Gladiator aircraft kit in 1/32^nd scale. As is, the kit comes with a couple of British Air Service options for early World War 2 campaigns, but if you want something a bit more exotic, ICM has answered the call with a new decal sheet offering markings for four different nations which also used the Mk. 1 – China, Greece, Belgium and the Netherlands.