Richard Humm

If they're going for the 70s nostalgia market, a Rod Stewart cassette should be the musical accompaniment.

The original Hasegawa tooling did have the engraved stars, as they are mentioned in the 1966 IPMS Magazine review of the kit. Hasegawa may well have removed them later on (they definitely made changes to some of the other early tools, like the Lightning), but I think both boxings of the FROG kit still had them.

Well, the B-52 was first issued in 1967 so it's definitely classic Monogram - it would need the "jet engine sound" to be a real original, though!

I've got a load of old Revell and Monogram kits, so I could get involved. My suggestion for a cut-off point is when the two companies merged in 1986, which still lets the Monogram 1/48 scale Century Series jets in.

For classic Revell, I'd say before the Ceji takeover in 1979 or possibly go up to the merger with Monogram in 1986, as then we could take classic Monogram as up to the same date. Italeri might be more difficult, as they haven't had any changes of management, and they started rather later than most of the other major manufacturers, around 1970. Perhaps with them, the whole of the 1980s could be included. The Gripen and the Bf 109F are from the 1990s so might be a bit later than a "classic" period, while your other kits are 1970s and 1980s so could be included.

No, the Revell F-101B was a new tool (in 1991! Where does the time go?) which looks like a scaled down version of the Monogram kit. It has nothing to do with the Matchbox kit.

The 1974 FROG Lightning (and their Phantom and Harrier, also issued that year) were pretty much copies of the Hasegawa kits, but have only been issued as FROG and FROGspawn kits, not as Hasegawas. As the information on the origin of the mould comes from a book co-written by FROG's head of R & D, I think we can take it as accurate.

There are some aircraft kits in the Mistercraft range that were originated by ZTS Plastyk, so the H/I Class ships might be as well.

Isn't the Gladiator in that catalogue? I think it should be listed as F429. We've also got the kits that were new in the 1976 catalogue on the build list (Ar 234, Sea Vixen, B-17 and Lancaster (even if it's being converted)) and two of the four that were to be new releases in the 1977 range (Airacobra and Wellington - no-one's actually building a Twin Mustang or He 115 yet) - surprisingly the Rufe and Ventura weren't scheduled for release despite having been in the 1974 catalogue! Both the 1976 and 1977 lists have 65 aircraft, with the 1976 being nicely balanced with 12 in each of the Black, Blue, Red, Green and Orange series, and five larger aircraft. 1977 only has 11 Orange kits, with the Wellington to join the larger set. I might yet fill in a couple of the missing 1975 kits - I have all of them except the Zero in the stack facing me as I type this....

Congost are reputedly the only Revell subsidiary to have issued the FROG Bf 109F and FW 190A.

FROG seem to have started shrink-wrapping boxes when the Type H (this type) came in in 1974.

I did think about the current builds, I must admit... However, the Heinkel is one I remember building around 1977 or 1978 - I went out and bought the appropriate Humbrol Authentics mentioned in a Scale Models article by Ian Huntley and tried the technique he suggested of eliminating decal silvering by painting the decal film up to the images in the camouflage colours, applying them to the model before painting it, then painting up to the film edges. It wouldn't work if you were airbrushing, of course. My brother had the Boston back in the day, so there's some nostalgia value there, and it has Australian markings for the Boston III version which might interest someone here...

I went to the show in Billericay on Sunday and bought a few FROGs - there's still a month and a half to go, so I might get one or two built! The two bagged kits are the ex-Hasegawa A-7 Corsair II and a DFI Ventura in spectacularly yellow plastic.

There were four kits in the Humbrol Make'n Paint Kit series - the other one was the Spitfire Ia/Va.

It might have been the plastic they were using rather than the cold shut problem. The Novo discussion in the Lines/Hellstrøm FROG book says "All Frog moulds were tuned to use Shell SI73 polystyrene having a Melt Flow Index of 35. Soviet polystyrene, on the other hand, was found to have an index of around 4! This meant that, in order to make the plastic fill the moulds, the temperature had to be increased by some 50º C and the injection pressure up to 100%. Not only was this very damaging to the moulds (several subsequently had to be repaired), but also often led to sub-standard mouldings. This since the extreme pressure forced the mould halves apart, letting plastic overflow into the gaps and form flash".