This is one of those little “add-ons” that make your carrier deck look real. The US Navy has always been very careful about parking their airplanes on the deck, and keeping them there. It’s considered “not good” when the deck pitches and a plane slides into the plane next to it, or even “more not good” if it slides off the deck into the water. Tying the plane down works, but the chocks certainly help, especially when you’re moving the plane.

The Kit

The package contains 4 chocks, each on its own pour sprue. There are two parts to each chock. One of the parts has a rod attached to the chock block. The other part has a hole the rod goes through to allow the chock to be adjusted to fit the wheel.

You get two sets of two chocks in the package.

Preparation

The chock part with the rod comes off the sprue fairly easily. The chock is fine, but the rod is pretty fragile. I broke two of the 4 during this part of the build. I could see that if I just glued the rod together, probably with CA, it would have a spot which the other chock part (the one with the hole) wouldn’t slide past it.

I came up with a pretty good fix. Back about 25 years ago, I was a member of the Polish Coast Watchers Chapter. One of the members, Fred Belke, brought in some wire they used where he worked. It’s called “tag wire”, and it was used to attach part number tags to parts. I still have some of this wire, and it’s very close in diameter to the rods on the chocks. So I got a piece of tag wire, cut it to length, drilled a shallow hole where the rod went into the chock, and super glued the wire in place. Marvelous. Thanks to you, Fred, these parts can be used.

The part with the hole in it required a little cleaning of that hole to allow the resin rod or the wire to go through. Easily done with a pin vise and a very small drill.

Assembly

This has a level of difficulty approaching zero. Slide the rod through the hole. Don’t lose the parts.

Painting

Almost as simple as assembly. Most of the photos I found on the Internet showed bright yellow. I used Tamiya flat yellow. Worked fine.

A quick check to be sure I didn’t miss spots while painting, and reassembled the chocks. They look good under that Hellcat.

Many thanks to Brengun for allowing me to review these items. They really add something to that parked WW2 fighter. Also thanks to John Noack and Phil Peterson for managing the review organization.