Plastic Ship Modeler

By Shane Jenkins

Well the latest PSM has popped through the mailbox, and what a good issue it is.

For those of you who may be unfamiliar with PSM, it's an approximately 44 page B/W quarterly publication put out by Dan Jones, printed on good quality paper. It covers the new releases, upcoming kits, book reviews, real life naval info various articles on ships, kits & conversions.

This issue contains the following:

• More of Chris Drage's excellent models - this time Chris has done a selection of WEM's 1/700 Flower class corvettes & shown what can be done with this excellent little kit. You can see the full article at WEM's website.

• Ray Bean tackles the resin 1/700 Jim Shirley kit of the USS Chicago

• Falk Pletscher gives us a walkaround of the Krivak I ASW frigate Druzhny. This is an excellent reference for those who wish to build the Skywave kit, I wish I had these photos when I built my Krivak II for IM last year. Figures that good refs would come out after I've finished the kit.

• Falk also tackles the 1/700 HP-Models kit of the Schleswig-Holstein.

• Dave Judy builds Flagship Models 1/35 resin kit of the Phalanx 20mm CIWS.

• Dan Jones updates his article from the test issue of PSM (titled Plastic Model Ships - PMS I wonder why he changed it ;-) ) on the Japanese Escort ships of WWII. There was some talk about the repetition of articles in PSM - this I feel is a legitimate use of the article, since the test issue (put out in 1993) was a very limited run to test the viability of the magazine and as such does not really count in PSM's run.

• There is also a selection of ship models from the 1999 IPMS(USA) Nats held at Orlando last year.

• Fisherman in peace and war - this short article covers fishing boats used by the Germans, Italians and British, with plans. I hope to see more on this topic in future issues

Plus all the usual columns:

• Navinfotel - current naval news

• One to One Hundred by Paul Jacobs - This deals with all the latest news on the 1/1200/1250 range of miniatures.

• There's also a new column by Joe D'amato (of JAG Collective fame) on research on the net, very informative.

• Book reviews

• Letter's page

All in all, I can heartily recommend Plastic Ship Modeller. It fills a gap left by the general modelling mags and for those ship modeller's not interested in RC ships.

PSM subscription and back issues information (all available except for the test issue) can be obtained by Dan Jones or by writing to him at:

Plastic Ship Modeler
P.O Box 2183
Arvada,
CO, 80001-2183

Subscription costs are as follows:

USA, Canada and South America - USD$20.00
Overseas - USD&25.00

If you would prefer to pay by credit card, White Ensign Models is, as far as I know, the only outlet to take credit card payment for PSM. Check out their site for more info on subscriptions and the back issue listings.

It is also available from Pitroad in Japan, Christian Schmidt and NNT in Germany.