Table of contents for March 2021 in FineScale Modeler

In Indochina in the early 1950s, the French developed a riverine combat force to suppress communist guerillas in the Mekong Delta. Later, the fledgling South Vietnamese navy organized River Assault Groups, earning the wooden patrol or vedette vessels the moniker “RAG boats.” They sported a variety of improvised, field-applied, jungle camouflage. Reading about the riverine campaigns of the wars in Vietnam sparked Dana Mathes’ interest in this obscure subject, but he found few references on RAG boats. Monogram produced the only plastic kit of the vessel in 1967, but the detail is crude by modern standards. He located one of the Monogram kits on eBay, built it out of the box, and applied camouflage based on what he could glean from photos and drawings. “The kit was designed somewhat like…

Ever since Top Gun hit theaters in 1986, I have wanted to model the needlelike enemy fighters in the film: the so-called MiG-28. Of course, the MiG-28 doesn’t exist, and the villains were actually Northrop F-5E Tiger IIs painted jet black with a Soviet-style red star on the tail. But most moviegoers didn’t really notice or care — neither did I. The U.S. Navy still uses F-5s as adversaries for training, and those aircraft were recently upgraded with advanced avionics and radar as F-5Ns. A few of these jets are painted gloss black and kept extremely clean. painted gloss black and kept extremely clean. Kitty Hawk’s 1/32 scale F-5E (No. KH32018) was a welcome release because the only other model of this iconic fighter in that scale is a 25-year-old…

Given just how many ships have zipped across screens in the many incarnations of Star Wars, the very first one has not seen a lot of love in plastic kit form. Commonly referred to as the Blockade Runner, Princess Leia’s consular ship, Tantive IV, is a Corellian CR90 corvette. Bandai released a 1/1000 scale kit of the vessel both on its own and paired with a 1/350 scale Millennium Falcon. Despite the relatively small size, the parts are well detailed and practically shout to be painted and weathered. 1 It took me one evening to build this little model. The kit is engineered to be built without glue, but I used Mr. Hobby and Tamiya liquid cement to make sure everything stayed together. 2 Clamps held the major components together as the…

Looking back, moving forward I have been modeling on and off since the late 1950s, both as a sloppy “oh well” beginner and a hardcore “build for competition” modeler. I quit for 40 years and am now retired and building once again. When I was a hardcore builder in the ’70s and ’80s, the kits were good but not great. The only aftermarket items were Microscale decals, so you had to create detail pieces by scrounging materials and adapting them. I started building cars because I could build a replica of a real car or my own design and color scheme. It’s still the same, but now the aftermarket world and the tools and supplies available are amazing. Holy cow, look at the photo-etched metal, decals, resin, and 3D-printed pieces,…

The Stratofortress, Boeing’s strategic bomber whose long career shows no signs of ending, has proven a versatile platform. Among its many roles, one of the most colorful was the NB-52B (No. 52-0008) used to launch the X-15. This early airframe was mostly unpainted during early test flights and with its bright orange trim it belies the B-52’s unflattering sobriquet, BUFF, for big, ugly, fat… uh… fellow. Monogram modified its 1/72 scale B-52D to produce an NB-52 kit, but it is difficult to find. So I converted one of the bomber kits (No. 8292) and dressed it with Cutting Edge decals. For the load, I used an X-15 I built many years ago. 1 As part of the modifications done to the NB-52B, the tail-gun turret was removed. After cutting off the…

G’day, sir! I’m James, an 11-year-old Swiss plastic modeler. I was born in Hyderabad, India. My father is Swiss and my mother from Chișinău, Moldova (formerly part of the Soviet Union). I did my kindergarten at an Australian school in Chennai. I admire, appreciate, trust, and, ultimately, love your work as an editor of my favorite publication. Your articles, comments, and particularly the New Product Rundown with the lovely Elizabeth Nash are simply perfect for me. Please extend my appreciation to Mr. Michael Chorney for his outstanding contribution about masking with leaves. I plan to use it on my next Hasegawa Nakajima Ki-44, and it gave us a good excuse to make a long walk into the big forest in the Jura mountains looking for those “magic” leaves. Thanks also…

Situated between North Africa and Sicily, the Mediterranean island Malta afforded Allied forces based there during World War II strategic advantage for disrupting Axis supply routes. Because of this the Italian and German forces consistently attacked Malta by air and sea. With an invasion of Malta expected, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill wanted the garrison reinforced with tanks. In October 1940, two Light Tank Mk.VIBs built by Vickers-Armstrongs and four Matilda infantry tanks were deployed to Malta as a morale booster. Fortunately, the invasion never came, and by 1943, with Allied gains in the Mediterranean and the invasion of Sicily, Malta was no longer under threat. Malta’s limestone walls and buildings inspired the unique camouflage applied to vehicles stationed there. The pattern was not used anywhere else and also found…

The Starsky & Hutch 1976 Ford Gran Torino, also known as Zebra 3 or by the less flattering moniker the “striped tomato,” became an iconic TV show and, later, movie car. My plan was to build an accurate replica from the parts provided in the Revell 1/25 scale Starsky & Hutch Ford Torino kit (No. 85-4023) and add minor details where appropriate. What I realized was to do that, I’d need to find a car that matched the parts that came in the box. Discrepancies between the kit and both the TV vehicle and the 2004 movie car abound, so I went hunting on the internet where I found (I think) the reference car used for the kit. But even it had differences, like the dual-quad carb in the kit…

Full disclosure: A couple of years back, I participated in an online debate about the practicality of the model industry bringing out a new-tool 1/72 scale C-130 Hercules. I opined that a new state-of-the-art kit couldn’t be made that would retail for less than $100. And at that price or higher, it would be difficult to sell enough units to earn a profit for the company. It seemed to me that the potential market had been saturated with Airfix, Italeri, and ESCI kits produced over the last five decades. I was wrong. Leave it to the Russians to teach me a lesson in capitalist economics! Although Zvezda has been around for years, this is their first 1/72 scale kit of a U.S. military aircraft, providing me with my first opportunity…