Tuesday, March 26, 2013

Model Military International No.07

Hot on the heels of Trumpeter's 1:35 Chinooks comes a smaller 1:48 offering from Italeri of the A version in 'gunship' format. Hopefully, further variants will follow including perhaps those in current service with the RAF. The kit comes in the distinctive new blue and grey packaging with eye-catching artwork on the box lid and an illustration of one of the builds therein together with some detail shots of the model on the bottom. The kit itself consists of some 160 crisply moulded, flash free parts in olive green plastic together with 7 clear parts for the glazing. Decals are provided for 3 US Army versions, two from the 1967 Vietnam era and one from the Aberdeen Proving Ground in 1966. The latter is the more colourful in that it has the yellow lettering of the period and full colour stars and bars. The decals themselves are first rate, thin, in register and with the absolute minimum of carrier film. Instructions are standard Italeri - clear, concise and easy to follow.

AFV Modeller Issue 15

After a hiatus of nearly 25 years I have returned to my boyhood hobby; that of modelling armored fighting vehicles. It was a chance conversation with a friend in a local model shop that led me to wonder what kinds of models were being made today I then spent about two months surfing the internet where I discovered some wondrous things; modern highly detailed plastic injection kits, resin conversions, metal gun barrels, amazing photo-etch detail sets and, perhaps most interestingly to myself, working metal tracks! I was hooked, there was no turning back and almost at the same time my wife bought tor mo the Academy mid-production Tiger 1 with a detailed Interior. And so began this project which to date has taken over seventeen months and has only seen the creation of the kit hull, without dock and turret. As a child I had only modelled in 72nd scale and so working in 35th was completely new to me Right from the outset I was determined that I would do as good a job as possible and I realised that quite a bit of research would be required. What I will therefore try to describe in this article is more of the thought processes that went Into this project rather than the actual build itself.

Military Miniatures in Review No.11-12

Every September (Labor Day weekend, to be exact), something very interesting takes place in St Louis, Em-Oh. A small legion of dedicated dorks, dweebs, geeks and devotees descend on a unsuspecting Holiday Inn to attend MasterCon. Now being your basic cynics we always gave the obligatory "Hurumpf" whenever we heard the word MasterCon. "What fun could that possibly be" was often echoing in our hallways. Modelers tend to be an anti-social lot, given to huddling in the corner over our X-actos and occasionally growling at passersby. So it was with considerable reservation that we packed our camera and a sandwich or two and headed out for the rolling hills of Missouri on a sultry late summer weekend. Guess what happened? We had a blast!

Scale Aircraft Modelling 06/2009

FREIGHTDOG'S LATEST full kit, to be sold under the Silver Cloud label, is the Hawker Siddeley P. 1154, cancelled tragically despite representing Britain's greatest possibility of a successful export supersonic fighter. The kit is full resin, mastered and moulded by Anigrand in China before packing with decals and instructions here in the UK. There are 29 resin parts in the kit, including a clear resin cockpit transparency. All the parts in my sample were well moulded, although there were a few bubbles here and there. I wonder if Anigrand are using some sort of injection moulding technique, since many of the smaller parts are linked together by a sort of 'sprue'. The resin used is quite brittle, so care is needed with cleanup, but none of the mould gates are over large. Certainly no saws or motor tools will be needed to clean up the parts. With so few parts, you might expect construction to be pretty easy, and the good new is that it is! With proper cleanup, I found that all of the parts fitted extremely well. Minimal amounts of filling were required to make good any of the joints, and very few problems presented themselves throughout the entire build.

Model Airplane News 06/2013

For the upcoming 25th Annual Top Gun Scale Invitational, Model Airplane News is once again the primary media sponsor. Held at Frank Tiano's Paradise Field RC flying facility in Lakeland, FL, this year's event is a full five days and will be from May 1 through May 5. As we do every year, we help to heat up the excitement with plane and pilot previews from contestants planning to compete for the title of Mr. Top Gun. Who wouldn't like a sneak peek of some of the best scale RC airplanes and pilots in the country? We will also feature some of these great scale masterpieces at ModelAir-planeNews.com/TG2013 with added bonus photos and details not included here. You'll be able to see these amazing planes and learn some of the back stories that motivate the competitors to build and compete with their chosen aircraft. So, for now, here are some of the pilots and their planes, who have shared their project planes with us!