The Aircraft

The Bell P-39 Airacobra was a beautiful design. It had an innovative layout for the fuselage, with the engine mounted in the center fuselage, behind the pilot. The P-39 was also the first US Fighter with a tricycle undercarriage.

With these advantages came one large disadvantage. The engine did not have a turbo supercharger, which prevented the aircraft from performing well at high altitude, above 12,000 feet. Because of this, the RAF rejected the P-39. The Soviet Air Force did accept the Airacobra, as most of their combat took place at low to medium altitudes.

The P-39 also had a solid weapons system. The central mounted engine allowed the mounting of the T9 37mm cannon in the nose. This weapon could penetrate 8 inches of armor at 500 yards.

Background

German battleships and heavy cruisers were equipped with three armored fire-control posts (in the conning tower, on the foretop, and on top of the aft superstructure. Target selectors around the foretop selected air targets. Each of the selectors, called ZAGs, worked in conjunction with one of the Directors for targeting. Veteran Models Fire Control Set provides 4 - ZAG Light Flak Directors, 4 - Zielsäule C/38 S Night Directors, plus 8 - 1540mm Search Light Directors.

The resin pieces are exquisitely cast with extremely fine detail, and virtually no imperfections. There is some very minor flash on the parts, but no bubbles or voids. The eyepieces even have recessed ends! The small photoetch fret provides hand wheels for the Light Controllers and Night Directors, and there are several spares for the extremely small pieces.

Hauler produces photo-etched and resin upgrade sets for armored fighting vehicles (AFVs), airplanes, cars, railway vehicles, and dioramas. They also produce a few resin kits. Their products are in most of the common scale sizes, 1/72, 1/48, and 1/35, but they also produce a number of other items in common railroad hobbyist scales.

This set of resin gold bars is an example of some of the unusual items they offer. The set includes a stack of 12 bars and another four individual bars. All of the parts are attached to their sprue stubs, and you’ll need to take care when cutting them off. The stack of bars presented the most trouble for me to get off the stub while keeping the tops of the bars intact. I was able to sand down any imperfections and they came out pretty well. The stack and individual bars represent the “Good Delivery” bars that are very familiar to most of us from television shows and movies. Not sure too many people have actually seen or held one in real life.

A nice addition to Scale Aircraft Conversions (SAC) already impressive array of aftermarket landing gear is the set for the F/A-18 A, B, C, and D. The parts are made of white metal and include three separate landing gear pieces, as well as a metal tree with two landing gear support pieces.

A few mold seams are apparent on the shock absorbers of both the main and the nose gear, but they can easily be sanded or scraped off carefully with an X-Acto knife. Be careful to not bend the soft metal when cleaning up the parts. Also, the molded plastic nose gear cover that comes in the Hasegawa kit will have to be glued to the metal. A touch of super glue does the trick.

Our good friend and supporter Abby Robey of Xuron supplied several new tools to us for review. Up first is this sprue cutter. Like all of Xuron’s tools, this is a finely crafted tool that will deliver years of service if properly used. That means plastic only – the fine cutting edges are shaped to deliver a near-flush cut on soft plastic – use them on metal and you’ll damage that edge.

I did a test cut on a standard sprue runner from the Eduard Spitfire I’m reviewing – take a look at the results in photo 3. Even on a relatively thick piece of styrene, the tool delivers a near-perpendicular cut through the runner. Moving on to “normal” usage, I removed one of the horizontal stabilizers from its tree – note (photo 4) that the resulting cut is almost perfectly flush. Cleaning up parts is my least favorite part of building; these cutters will reduce the magnitude of that tedious task. Highly recommended!