SCALE MODEL NEWS

HOBBY BOUNTIES is run by Peter Chiang in Singapore, who ran another of his model competitions on 7 August 2021. Mat Irvine and Tony James of Timeless Hobbies (ex-Comet Miniatures) were asked to judge the entries. Mat Irvine: The subjects concentrated on vehicles and figures; I dealt with the former, Tony the latter. However when we’d both done our initial judging, we each looked at all the entries, then swapped notes and found we’d come to exactly the same conclusions for both! (Tony reckoned it was about the first time we both agreed on anything!) It was a small but eclectic selection of entries. Particularly notable was a rally version of the 1:32 scale Ford Escort by Paul Tattersall. Also two conversions using the ‘Quick Build’ VW T1 Bus by Razali Ahmed. In the figures section we were both very impressed with Victor Wong’s ‘shadow boxes’ featuring Airfix’s 54mm figures. Both cleverly used existing paintings as the background, with figures added to make a 3D foreground – and it was ...

THIS IS AN EXCELLENT KIT FOR science-fiction and fantasy lovers. It’s to 1:48 scale, and is based on a TV series from the 1960s. Mat Irvine:  Land of the Giants (LOTG) was an Irwin Allen TV show, with a plot loosely based on the flight of a suborbital spaceship, the  Spindrift . The craft was travelling from Los Angeles to London, when it went through some sort of space warp which sent it to crash-land on a mystery planet, where things are a dozen times larger than normal – including human-like giants, who regard the  Spindrift  crew as 'little people.'  A lot of time in the two-year LOTG series was spent with the  Spindrift  crew defending themselves from assorted giant-sized creatures, although I should point out that the particular scenario depicted by this kit never actually existed on screen, being based on publicity artwork. However, three of the  Spindrift  crew, Captain Steve Burton, Betty Hamilton and Dan Erickson, are shown here usi...

  WITH SIR RICHARD BRANSON beating his space entrepreneur rival, Jeff Bezos, into space by a week or so on July 11, 2021, it's time to take a detailed look at Revell’s 1:144 scale kit of the Virgin Galactic craft. Mat Irvine: This kit actually dates from 2013 and there was a brief look at Revell test-shots in December of that year. The test shot was moulded in grey, but this production kit is in white, with three main runners, two of which are identical. Two identical clear runners are provided for the windows.  The duplication is because the layout for WhiteKnightTwo differs from the first generation. Now there are two identical fuselages with cabins for WK2. There are four Pratt and Whitney turbofan engines, two each side.  The windows are also duplicated, as all cabins share a virtually identical window layout. And SS2 is much larger than SS1, so much so that it in 1:144 scale it is about the same size as the SS1 in 1:72.   Because the WK2 fuselages are identical...