Over the past few years, Master has established itself as a quality provider of turned-metal aftermarket details for ships, armor, and aircraft. Their latest set of new releases cover the F6F Hellcat, providing welcome metal details for three variants in three major scales. The detail set under review today covers the F6F Hellcat Night Fighters’ armament configurations in 1/72 scale.
What's New
Over the past few years, Master has established itself as a quality provider of turned-metal aftermarket details for ships, armor, and aircraft. Their latest set of new releases cover the F6F Hellcat, providing welcome metal details for three variants in three major scales. The detail set under review today covers the F6F-5 Hellcat’s late armament configuration, six covered .50 cal Browning barrels, in 1/72 scale.
General Motors brought back the Camaro in 2010, and in 2012 came out with the ZL1 version. The ZL1 features a more powerful 6.2L 580hp LSA V-8 engine and for many, is the flagship Camaro on the market today.
The kit itself comes with a pre-finished body, and 48 parts. It’s listed as a “skill level 3” kit and comes in an attractive box that shows the color of the car. My review sample was red, but I have seen black versions as well.
Parts are packaged very well with the pre-finished body held in place with a plastic strip, and the chrome wheels packaged in their own container. The clear sprue and the red tail light sprue are packed in their own bags, as are the side mirrors and tires.
The kit’s clear parts come attached the body, so there is little chance they are going to get marked up. A nice touch is the black outlines along all of the clear parts.
Parts are molded in black, and a metallic grey and the external body parts are pre-painted.
Summary
Academy apparently has teamed with Italeri to produce one of the first ‘Calliope Shermans’ to appear in some time. The M4A3 vehicle is produced by Academy, while the T-34 multiple rocket launcher looks like it is from Italeri, based on sprue shots of the rocket launcher parts. As with all of their AFV kits, Academy provides the builder with good value based on fewer parts without sacrificing a lot of detail.
Scale Aircraft Modelling's October 2015 issue comes with a gorgeous picture of a Wolfpacks 1/72 T-2 Buckeye in trainer markings. For me, that sets the tone for a great issue as I love the color scheme.
And that is how this issue starts with Karl Robinsons’ build of the beautiful 1/72 scale T-2 in the US Navy training scheme. He is well impressed with the kit and only notes small issues with fitting the intakes and flaps which are easily corrected.
Roden’s 1/144 kit of Bristol’s Type 175 Britannia is built by Andy McCabe. He builds it in BOAC markings and it looks wonderful for what he considers a “quick build”.
Mike Verier writes an excellent article on Gunships, highlighting the Roden 1/144 AC-47 Spooky. Not only does the article have an excellent build of the kit in which he scratch builds bulkheads and interior detail, but he follows it with an article detailing Roden 1/144 AC-119K and more info on other gunships.
The kit is extremely well done with all the parts fitting together as they should. Revell even included chain to tie down cars and vinyl tubing to plumb all the hydraulic lines. The decal sheet has several new car window stickers that I thought was pretty neat.
There was very little to no flash on this kit, but the instructions were not very well done. Case in point – part #48, hydraulic line junction box. Instructions call for attaching two (2) to the underside of the frame. No problem there. The problem arise because there are twelve (12) of the part #48 and they’re not shown or mentioned anywhere in the instructions. You need to look at the box cover to discover the placement.
I have to mention that the completed kit is huge and will easily fit 6 cars and maybe even 8.
HOK white was used to paint the chassis and framing while HOK Galaxy grey was used for the ramps. I made the Crazy Auto Transport decals rather than using those supplied in the kit.
Looking at all those photos of Polikarpov I-16s sitting on the grass and noting that the elevators are both drooping? Aires has come to the rescue with a beautiful set to replace the horizontal tail surfaces for the Polikarpov I-16. There are no supplied instructions; you simply swap out the kit provided plastic parts with the new Aires replacements. These Aires parts are specific replacements for the kit parts found in the Eduard series of I-16 kits.
Aires has molded the stabilizer and elevator perfectly in light grey resin with no apparent bubbles. The Aires stabilizer and elevator are supplied on a single resin sprue with thin resin attachments to the parts that should minimize any cleanup.
History Brief
The Mk VIII was the follow-up of the Mk VII without the pressurized cabin and differed little from it’s Mk VII sibling. All Mk VIII Spitfires were built solely by Supermarine. A few early production models had extended wingtips, but the majority had the standard version. There are three sub-variants; the LF Mk VIII for low altitude, the F Mk VIII for medium altitude and HF Mk VIII for high altitude. Each was powered respectively by the Merlin 66, Merlin 63 and Merlin 70 engines.
The Mk VIII served almost exclusively overseas in the Mediterranean, with both the Desert Air Force and the USAAF, in the Pacific with the Royal Australian Air Force and with the RAF in the China-Burma-India theater. After the Mk IX and Mk V, the Mk VIII was the third most numerous operational variant with 1,658 examples.
Quickboost provides one pitot tube and two ShKAS 7.62mm gun barrels. Of note is the re-sealable packaging that Quickboost uses that makes the parts easy to review and then stuff back into the package securely. There are no supplied instructions; you simply swap out the kit provided plastic parts with the new Quickboost replacements.
Quickboost has molded the pitot tube and gun barrels perfectly in light grey resin with no apparent bubbles. The Quickboost pitot tube and gun barrels have no mold seams to sand off on these tiny parts, and superior detail of actually hollowing the barrel as opposed to a flat face to drill out.
Eduard’s new SUPERFABRIC (the name alone conjures thoughts of Wile. E. Coyote, Super Genius in my mind…) is a new line of seat belts from the ubiquitous aftermarket manufacturer. This latest evolution of scale aircraft seat belts is different from the company’s prior iterations, in that there are no phot-etched parts, and no cutting of materials to use these. They are made from a vinyl like, self adhesive fabric. They are printed in color, and have nice details, consisting of stitch marks and the buckle hardware.
When my set arrived, I eagerly opened the envelope, and gave them the once over, and apart from the above mentioned niceties, something seemed off to my eyes. I double checked the packaging and instructions, and they claimed the appropriate scale is 1/48. I checked again. If these are truly in 1/48, then Imperial Japanese Navy pilots must have been completely covered by their seat belts! They are very much too large.