Good Morning Viet Nam

Who hasn't seen or heard images of Viet Nam with a boom box or radio or record player blasting in the background. Who hasn't seen or heard of Adrian Cronauer. This kit is your way of introducing that whole area of modeling into your dioramas.

The "boom" box

Standard packing is what you will get from Custom Dioramics. Nice solid styrene box, with great box art to help you paint. Inside is the ever present zip lock bag keeping all the parts
from rattling around.

Parts

The parts are standard CD. Very nice workable resin in a neutral beige color. There are resin blocks on every part. There are parts for three different music makers.
The basic parts are....

There are two one piece units. There is a radio that would appear in an urban building such as an office. This piece is the short wide radio. It measures 16mm wide x6mm high x 8mm deep. It would not really "fit" in a Field Headquarters. You could tie a story line where a GI hi-jacked it from town and brought it to the front. Its features are to "delicate" for a combat situation.

The second one piece item is a classic "boom box" radio. This one is the two speaker radio/tape player. It measures 17mm wide x 8mm high x 6mm deep. This is the type you see bungee corded to a Pibber or in a UH-51 blasting some Morrison and the Doors or Jimmie Hendrix.

The last item in the kit is a period record player. The end/built size of this is 8mm wide x 7mm high x 10mm deep in the closed position - 8mm x 12mm x 10mm in the open position. The record player is a 'portable' version, with a lid that opens on a big box. Inside the box is a nice turntable with an arm that holds the needle. The pieces are all nicely molded with great detail. Detail includes buttons, dials, speaker wires, etc. On the record player the disk on the turn table has the classic groves to help grip the record.

The resin blocks are placed at strategic locations on almost all the parts so that any sign of removal will be hidden. The needle arm on the record player has its block right across the top. Based on the way the part is molded this is unavoidable. It won't be a problem for anyone who has worked with resin before. For those who haven't I would simply recommend being careful when removing the block, you may want to cut off the large portion leaving a bit behind. Then sand down the remaining bit by hand. This will help avoid breakage.
You can see that the pieces should fall together and reproduce a version very close to the 1:1 version shown.

Impression

These are great additions to anyone who models subjects from the late '50s right through to the '70s. You can use the boom box item right through the '90s without much question. The other two items would be a bit of a stretch in the '90s. Given the simple nature of these pieces they will fit into a wide range of dioramas. These are simple "color and drop" pieces. Add color, drop them into a diorama.


Great kit, this one is a buy to have on stock version.



I'd like to thank VLS for providing this kit for review - Thanks