What's New

Review Author
Dave Morrissette
Published on
Company
Quickboost
Scale
1/48
MSRP
$8.50

Hobbyboss has an excellent series of hits coming, and their line of F3H Demon kits is most welcomed with their foldable wings and engraved lines.

Like most modern planes, the kit suffers from the ability to do a really good ejection seat. Quickboost gives modelers an option with a perfectly cast five piece seat with molded seat belts. The seat comes with the main body, headrest, center stick and two loops for the sides of the seat. This is an early seat, those early seats being replaced by the MB series.

Assembly is straightforward after removing the parts from the mold block. Notice in the comparison pictures that the kit parts do have some large ejector pin marks and that there are no seat belts. The Quickboost seat is a direct drop in and much better in shape and accuracy. This is the kind of resin I love- large improvement, low cost and easy to use.

Review Author
Ron Bell
Published on
Company
Trumpeter
Scale
1/700
MSRP
$39.95

The HMS Warspite was one of the Queen Elizabeth class dreadnaughts launched during the First World War. These were the state of the art battleships of the time and the general soundness of their design shows in the fact that the last of them was not disposed of until the 1950's! They went through many refits that changed their appearance quite a bit over the years. The WWII Warspite has been modeled several times in several scales, most recently in the newly popular 1/350, but never in her WWI fit. The Trumpeter kit is of her appearance when she was launched, thus she joins a very small group of injection kits of WWI ships and I believe the only one as she was during that war. As I build ship models very slowly, this will be a two-part review. This first will be an in the box review and the second will be an actual build. Now, let's open the box and see what we have.

Review Author
Dave Morrissette
Published on
Company
Quickboost
Scale
1/48
MSRP
$6.50

It's amazing to me how many of the kits that were not around at all are actually being produced now. One of the companies coming out with a great selection of kits is Kinetic and their S2F Tracker is a lovely kit with options for wing folds and nicely engraved panel lines. One small deficiency of the kit is that it ignored the engine exhausts which are above and below the wings on the nacelles. For a lot of modelers, this is no big deal and the kit still is wonderful. View the images in the slideshow which clearly illustrate the location of the exhausts, with arrows indicating where they should go.

Installation is easy. I used a small drill bit to open the holes and then refined them with files and a knife. Once the holes have been opened and cleaned up, the exhausts were added. Total time, to open the holes and satisfactorily test fit the exhausts was about 15 minutes. This is a great addition to a great kit and would be a great start to weathering the Tracker.

Review Author
Dave Morrissette
Published on
Company
Quickboost
Scale
1/48
MSRP
$6.50

Hasegawa’s 1/48th scale J-35 Draken kit is an excellent representation of the plane. Like most injected kits, the ejection seat is not as good as the rest of the kit due to molding limitations. Now Quickboost comes to the rescue with a highly detailed resin Saab ejection seat with molded belts.

I have enclosed pictures of the Quickboost seat as well as Aires seat and the kit seat. Aires has a set of PE seat belts that need to be built prior to installing the seat, Quickboost's belts are molded onto the seat and the kit seat has no belts at all. The Aires and Quickboost seat are similar with excellent detail on the fabric and seat. The Aires seat comes with an entire replacement cockpit.

Review Author
Dave Morrissette
Published on
Company
Moebius Models
Scale
1/8
MSRP
$39.95

When Moebius announced a kit of the “Creature from the Black Lagoon with Victim”, I was excited. I have always been a fan of the 1954 movie creature, story and Julie Adams. It got even better when they announced Adam Dougherty, the "Kreature Kid". It was a wonderful day when Review package arrived in the mail. Out came the DVD and straight to the basement.

I broke the kit down into three builds- the creature, the girl, and the base. The kit comes with an excellent sandy base with lizard, fossil hand, stones and a nice tropical fern.

Review Author
Michael Scott
Published on
Company
GasPatch Models
Scale
1/48
MSRP
$8.49

This is a very small item when assembled, as the photographs will show. The model is composed of four parts: the body of the indicator, cast in a slick, red plastic; a bezel made from thin steel similar to a photo etch part; the wind vane assembly which appears to me to be of plastic or resin; and two identical instrument dials printed in black on a thin plastic sheet coated with what appears to be white paint.

The instructions are on the reverse of the packaging sheet and show all of the parts painted, prepared and ready to go. The resulting photographs show an extremely detailed and precise completed wind powered indicator. However, reality does not meet up with advertising in this instance.

Review Author
Rob Benson
Published on
Company
HK Models Co.
Scale
1/32
MSRP
$285.00

Thank you to Mr. Neil Yan of HK Models and the IPMS Reviewer Corps for the opportunity to review a wonderful new model release in large-scale aircraft. This next installment covers the waist interior and fuselage assembly, which is from the ring mount around the ball turret through the Cheyenne tail turret, and closing up the fuselage. I originally thought it might be more instructive to work up the armament first, but after reviewing the kit more with some experience, I elected to skip the all of the cool-looking 50s and describe them when they get installed. Instruction steps 15 through 25 are used to construct this subassembly.

Review Author
Roger Rasor
Published on
Company
GasPatch Models
Scale
1/32
MSRP
$9.75

The cascade of kits, aftermarket details sets, and decals for WWI aircraft has given model builders reason to play in an appealing arena that only a few had the nerve to venture into in the past. Because most of these products have been conceived and produced in the last four or five years, current technologies have blessed builders with ever-improving quality. And, since the level of detail molded into today’s kit components – especially in 1/32 scale – is literally breathtaking, any aftermarket detail that is introduced into the fray must equal or surpass what will be found inside the kit box.

Review Author
William Nichols
Published on
Company
Gallery Models
Scale
1/48
MSRP
$55.98

For the longest time, the only 1/48 scale model of the workhorse Sikorsky H-34 helicopter was made by Revell, whose molds at one point were rumored to be “lost at sea.” Then, after being missing in action for nearly 25 years and fetching high prices on eBay and elsewhere, the venerable Revell kit was joined by a new-tool H-34 coming from MRC’s house brand Gallery Models. The announcement was released in 2012; MRC displayed test shots and box art for two forthcoming versions in Orlando at the 2012 National Convention – a USMC version and a US Navy version. The USMC version is the subject of this review.

When you open the largish box, you are greeted by no less than 231 parts on eight sprues of light gray plastic, three sprues of clear pieces, and two frets of brass photo etch parts. Decals are provided for three different H-34’s: