SCALE MODEL NEWS

From Mat Irvine: Here’s a look at Revell-Monogram kits for release in 2012. I’ve previously  mentioned the recreated Renwal Blueprint series, with the futuristic Teracruzer and Mace missile, but there’s much more coming down the line. Car kits First up, the lime-green 1932 Ford 'Rat Roaster' ( above ) shown at October’s International iHobby Expo in Chicago was a taste of things to come, as the car will soon be released as a brand-new 1:25 scale kit. In fact, there’s a feast of US wheels coming our way, as the Rat Roaster will be joined by a 1950 Oldsmobile Coupe, representative of an automobile marque that has largely slipped through the running boards until now. This fully-detailed kit, seen as a test shot at iHobby, will have various build options, including the choice of finishing as a plain-Jane stock version, or hopped up as a mild custom. Both the Ford and Oldsmobile should be available early 2012. Metal to plastic Corvette The 1962 Corvette will also be available around ...

Mat Irvine reports From around 1955, one of the mainstays of the US Army’s military might in Europe was the surface-to-surface Corporal ballistic missile, the first such to carry a nuclear warhead. The 139 km (86 mile) range Corporal looked sleek and functional, but in reality was very unreliable and took a large number of personnel to ready it for launch. But the Corporal did prove an ideal subject for the early Revell company’s growing range of space and missile kits, and it now stars as another of Revell-Germany’s Classic Kit range reissues. Uniquely, Revell issued the kit in two forms, one of which consisted of the missile and launcher, with three crew and a stand-alone tracking station; it’s this kit that Revell-Germany has reissued, using the original box-art as a centrepiece, with the ‘Classic Kits’ medallion added. These types of kit had to have ‘working parts’, so the launcher’s support arms were designed to be foldable, the transporting road wheels can be unsnapped, and suppo...

Mat Irvine reports Revell Germany has recently released another batch of Classic Kits, and this includes one of the oldest originals to be reissued to date, the F7U-3 Cutlass, dating back to 1953. This really does make it an ‘old style’ model kit, from the prominent raised rivets and etched-in decal placements, to the odd 1:60 scale, as it comes from a time when many kits were made to ‘fit the box’ size, not to a standard scale.  Nicely sculpted pilot figure Moulding on this Cutlass is on the heavy side, which was fairly usual for the period and has little of the fine detail you would expect from a modern kit, but the pilot figure - although moulded to his seat - is actually not too bad. Four early-model Sparrow missiles are provided as armament, though these are fairly basic in shape and detail. Revell Selected Subjects Program The idea of these Classic Kits originally came from the American side of the ‘Revell’ name, Revell-Monogram (technically now a separate company), who intro...

Mat Irvine reports Rocketry is about more than space launchers or missiles - there's also an important branch that has played an important, though mostly unsung role - sounding rockets. Named because they ‘sound out’ what’s going on ‘up there’, sounding rockets have launched small payloads to the edge of space, carried instruments to great heights, and been important in rocket motor development. The two most important such rockets have been the British Skylark series (last flight 2005) and the American Aerobee. From first flights way back in 1947, the Aerobee was developed into the Aerobee-Hi (first flight 1955), the X-8 ‘X-Plane’, and the 150, 170, 300 and 350 series. They varied in performance, including altitude, from 130-450 km (81-280 miles) but all were suborbital. 1037 Aerobees flew in total, the final one being a 150-series launched by NASA on January 17, 1985, making today the 25th anniversary of that last flight. Scale models of sounding rockets have been few and far betw...