ITALERI DETAIL SET FOR TANK-BUSTER FANS

The A-10 Thunderbolt II is a firm favourite with both its pilots and the scale model fraternity. There are A-10 kits aplenty in most scales, and there isn’t a really bad one amongst them. However, there’s no kit out there that can’t be improved with a spot of super-detailing and plenty of TLC.

With that in mind, Italeri has come up with a set of detail parts for 1:48 scale builders. Metal frets and cockpit details are supplied, as are engine details and - nicest of all - a model in its own right of THAT gun, the GAU8/A Avenger Gatling weapon, which can chuck out some 3900 coke-bottle sized rounds per minute. The gun is supplied with a wheeled dolly, so would look impressive next to a finished A-10.

The Italeri A-10 Detail Set is available from model stores and online suppliers, including Model Hobbies - with a useful £3.00 GBP ($4.78 USD - discount here.

ROBOT PLANE: 1:72 SCALE PREDATOR FROM ITALERI

SMN featured the Italian Piaggio Ape earlier this week, and now it’s time for a robot, in the form of Italeri’s RQ-1B Predator. It’s a nice kit, with less than two dozen parts - just right for an evening’s work after the sun goes down. As a great fan of snap-tite kits for their speed of assembly, even I could happily squeeze some glue for this one.

In real life, Predators are flown by remote pilots, sitting in air-conditioned portacabins which may be thousands of miles away from enemy action. It must be a bit more relaxing than getting your pants shot off, that’s for sure. The tiny size of these drones makes them difficult to spot from the ground - a Predator orbiting a hot-spot from a few thousand feet up is effectively invisible.

Lebanese model fan Emad Tabsh has built an Italeri RQ-1B Predator, and his pictures are posted online here. A nice presentation, Emad. The YouTube vid gives a good live-action feel for the machine - the audio is spoken in Italian, so you may need a phrasebook, but if you have an Apple iPhone, there could be a translator app that’ll do the job.

The Italeri RQ-1B Predator is available from model stores and online suppliers, including Model Hobbies here.