This is the sixth Ultracast figure I have had the honor of reviewing and I can honestly say that each one is better than the last. This figure of a Luftwaffe Fighter Pilot is no exception.

It is sculpted by my friend Mike Good. He has a world reputation as a sculpture of pilots in every scale, and I believe I have painted every one of them.

This piece is cast in hard tan resin in five parts that fit perfectly. The engineering is superb in that the pieces are pegged in such a way that there is no way to fit them wrong.

After removing the casting blocks and minor cleanup of seam lines, I assembled the parts and mounted the figure on my favorite working block, a medicine container. I like this method because it affords me a surface to hold onto once the figure is CA glued to it, and after the painting it is easily removed from it.

When I’m not building in the era of World War 2, I’m doing Vietnam subjects, which made the choice to do this review quite obvious for me. Just about all my modeling buddies are familiar with or have a number of these Squadron/Signal Walk Around books. If you’re one of the few modelers who are not familiar with these titles, you should be - and this latest volume on the M551 Sheridan is no exception.

Russ continues to deliver bits and pieces which are, when you think of it, invaluable! Most heavy thanks to him for providing IPMS USA yet another of his great works.

This set provides metal duplicates of the original plastic landing gear for a kit which has been with us since 1959. (I have a box with the Gulfhawk kit; it proves, along with the decal sheet with manufacturing data, that this kit is just a year younger than I am!). The kit was re-released by Monogram (and later by Revell) in 1964, 1973, and 1999, both as the Gulfhawk and the standard F3F. The kit has cut-down Gulfhawk wings for both releases…to which Mike West has a replacements for the proper wingspan in resin, or you can use internet resources to cut/paste two kits to get the same result with a LOT more work!

Plus Model has provided the armor modeler with a finely cast and detailed model of a German power generator used in WWII.

A quick check on the internet found that the Plus Model generator is in fact the Breuer WG3000 (3kw) generator. This generator delivers 3000w/220v/13.6a and uses a two-cylinder horizontally-opposed four-stroke engine that makes 17hp at 1,500 rpm. It was about as large as they came that used a skid; any larger and they were mounted on a frame with wheels, to be towed. The Plus Model rendition contains 24 resin parts, a photo-etch sheet (made by Hauler) with 21 p.e. parts, and a short length of copper wire.

The parts came bubble-wrapped inside a small cardboard box, but mine had 5 pieces broken off the casting sprue. Checking the small two-sided instruction sheet, I was able to identify the parts. Only one was broken badly enough that I had to make a new piece out of some styrene strips, but this wasn’t a problem.

This is the second volume in Ampersand Publishing’s pictorial history of the Churchill heavy infantry tank. The first volume covered the gun tanks, while this second volume covers the non-gun tanks, such as flame throwers, bridge layers, flail, and armored engineering vehicles. It is thus broken down into the following chapters: