Tabla de contenidos para March/April 2025 en FineScale Modeler

The only foreign user of both the F9F Panther and Cougar was the Argentine navy, which purchased 28 F9F-2B Panthers and two F9F-8T Cougars in the late 1950s and early ’60s. The two-seat Cougar trainers served until June 1971, and one of them became the first aircraft to break the sound barrier in Argentina. I wanted to build that particular plane as part of my collection of Argentine aircraft and the only game in town for a 1/48 scale two-seat Cougar is Kitty Hawk. The company is out of business now, but the kit can still be found online and in some stores. It has decent detail, but assembly is complicated with a multipart fuselage. A key to success when building certain kits is evaluating the parts and deviating from…

Much of model building involves thinking 10 steps ahead so you can construct and install seemingly simple items correctly. Hatches and gratings are two of those things. In a typical plank-on-bulkhead kit, there is a plywood subdeck with openings for masts, stairwells, and hatches. The instructions tell you to plank the deck and then make the hatch, only for you to discover that the grating does not fit the hatch and there is only a sliver of deck planking on one side and whole lot on the other. To make matters worse, the grating openings are so large that your scale-sized foot would get trapped in it. To avoid this whole matter, make your own gratings with prototypical openings and build the hatch around it. Then install the hatch and…

A fantastic addition to the current catalog of F-86 kits on the market, the Clear Prop! 1/48 scale F-86A Sabre plastic model kit appears to be the first 1/48 scale injectionmolded plastic “A” since Lindberg released one in 1953. The kit’s light gray plastic parts show fine recessed panel lines and details. Based on the parts breakdown, I suspect Clear Prop! is planning other versions of the Sabre. The detailed, multipart ejection seat receives gorgeous photo-etched metal (PE) seatbelts. Decal gauges settle nicely into the instrument panel’s raised bezels, and PE reflector bezels for the gunsight complete the panel. A finely molded control stick and side consoles with separate throttle and other levers finish the cockpit tub. The intake tunnel runs from the front to the compressor blades, and the…

If you visit FineScale.com, you’ll find our photo guidelines. In them, we steer potential contributors away from using smartphones to photograph their models and model projects for publication. Digital single-lens reflex (DSLR) cameras have a wider range of capabilities, readily shoot in RAW, and take better photos in general. However, proficiency becomes a challenge as does the expense. Believe it or not, not everyone owns a DSLR. However, just about everyone owns a smartphone. Modelers use smartphones to snap photos of their models all the time. And for upload to Facebook or Instagram or to share via text or on online forums, these are often good enough. However, for print there are considerations like photo size, color correction, and depth of field. All of these can be handled readily with…

The Sturmgeshütz III is one of World War II’s most easily recognizable German armored fighting vehicles and one of the most produced. Initially designed as mobile assault gun to provide direct-fire support to infantry, the vehicle was constantly up-armored and up-armed. The Ausf F was the first StuG III variant to mount a 7.5cm StuK 40 L/43 gun that could fire armor piercing rounds and turned the low-profile vehicle into a tank hunter. Later versions carried the longer and harder hitting L/48 gun. Prompted by the release of Takom’s new 1/35 scale StuGs, I grabbed a Dragon kit that had been lurking in my stash for many years and set about building it and a base for proper display. FINAL THOUGHTS WITH THE STUG ON THE BASE, I recruited Verlinden…

The venerable Humvee has been part of America’s armed forces since the 1980s. Many model manufacturers have produced many different Humvee kits, and now joining the ranks is the ICM 1/35 scale Humvee M1097A2 plastic model kit of a stripped-down, utility variant. Assembly begins with the single-piece frame, suspension, and drive train. The parts fit well and need only minimal cleanup for mold lines. As the most complex portion of the kit, I found the instructions unclear for locating certain parts, which is unfortunate because it’s the most complex part. Trial and error saw me through, and the rest of the kit was smooth sailing. The basic body builds quickly — it doesn’t even have doors! I only deviated from the build sequence in the instructions to hold off adding…

In the January/February 2025 FSM, I detailed and weathered a Bandai 1/48 scale AT-ST. My plan then was to place it in a scene from the third original Star Wars movie, Return of the Jedi, with Rebel soldiers drawing an Imperial Scout Walker away from the bunker housing the shield controls. The soldiers were kitbashed from existing figures, but I had to scratchbuild everything else. FINAL THOUGHTS ADDING THE AT-ST and the figures finished the scene. The big challenge for this diorama was the height differences between the trees, the AT-ST, and the figures. The scene needed a balanced design to exploit these differences and emphasize the giant trees and imposing Imperial walker compared to the figures. I wanted viewers to experience the same sense of scale they did watching…

In your modeling career, you’ve probably built more than a few scale car and truck kits, or perhaps you’ve produced models of historically significant ships in scale. However, I’ll bet that few of you have considered building a 1/25 scale drag or ski boat kit. We’re out to change that, starting right now. Drag and ski watercraft experienced immense growth in popularity and design progression from the late 1950s through the late 1960s. In their most advanced forms, they adapted automotive engines for power, with early Chrysler Hemis, Ford FE 390 and 427 V8s, 327 Chevy V8s, and even a few salvaged World War II Alllison V12 engines seen most often. Designed primarily for between one to five people, they were used as tow boats for water skiers, quarter-mile drag…

In the early 1960s, the scale model-car hobby was on fire. Every year brought new kits with new advances. Several of the kitmakers would buy impressive display ads in hot-rodding magazines, and in March 1963, AMT bought four pages in Car Craft. Looking like a newsletter tucked inside the larger magazine, AMT’s ad updated its ever-broadening kit lineup with single-page stories. One of those, titled “AMT Engineers Scale Nichels’ Stock Shop to Build Pontiac Kit.” (For the uninitiated, Ray Nichels was one of the premier race-car fabricators during the NASCAR’s “Golden Age” in the 1960s and early 1970s.) Apparently, AMT sent two engineers to Nichels’ shop in Highland, Indiana, where they photographed and scaled just about everything there. “The results?” the article read. “You’ll see when you pop the lid…