A while back Horizon Models, a new injection-molded model kit company in Australia, sent me a copy of their first kit, a 1/72 Mercury spacecraft in return for a review. So, here goes.
The kit includes parts to build not only the orbital capsule (with abort tower) but also the earlier “boilerplate” test articles. The results are small… but then, the Mercury capsule wasn’t exactly a Winnebago. Also included are photoetched steel detail parts, and stands for the two kits. The engineering of the parts seems to be quite well done, with the corrugations nice and clean and fricken’ tiny. On the whole this looks like a spiffy kit.
As an engineer, there is one aspect of the kit that makes me scratch my head a tad. The sprue as shown below includes the parts for one complete Mercury capsule, one incomplete Mercury capsule and one stand. In order to make this a “two capsule kit,” Horizon used the simple expedient of including two copies of the sprue. It seems to me that it would have been more efficient to include all the necessary parts (for one flight and one boilerplate) on a single sprue; but in doing it this way the kit builder winds up with a bunch of extra bits to be used for other projects.
The Mercury capsule kit is available from the Horizon Models website for $35.
Horizon has also just released a companion kit, a 1/72 Mercury-Atlas. I haven’t seen that, but it seems promising. And it’s available through Amazon.
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If you have a product you want me to review… hey, why not. Feel free to send me a copy or two. I’m particularly interested in reviewing gold bullion and the like.