Don't Call Me Late For Dinner! Custom Dioramics brings detail to the kitchen. Ben Jakobsen has sculpted their latest addition to a long line of detail sets. The set is #CD 6103, Cooking Utensils (Pots & Pans).

The pieces in this kit are a must for any food oriented diorama; pots, pans, coffee pots, kettles etc etc....
They will support a wide array of dioramas from a fire side cookout to a field kitchen.

Packaging

When you receive your kit it will come in a nice solid clear styrene box. The box is about 2"x4"x1" and very light. There is a nicely painted 'box' art label showing the basic pieces. Bob Letterman offers his rendition of how they can be painted.

Inside the box you will find a ziplock bag with the resin parts nicely contained.
As you can see from the pictures the ziplock bag is quite small compared to the styrene box. My first impression was that there would be substantial rattling of the resin pieces inside the styrene box. I think that the ziplock bag is the key to a safe arrival of the product if you have it shipped to you. Mine arrived safe, even the slender handles on the frying pans were fine.

What you get

When you break through the ziplock bag you will find:

• 2 large pots


• 2 coffee pots


• 2 kettles


• 4 frying pans


• 4 small pots


• 2 medium pots
  
• 2 bowls


• 2 lids

There are 20 pieces in all. The lids can be used for the medium pots or bowls.

All are well cast resin with nice detail. All of them come with the typical resin block.
There was a bit of flash in some of the handles. In addition the pots with handles have what I will term as "Support Block". There is an extra bit of resin that is between the pot handle and the resin pour block. This is thicker than flash and thinner than the block. It's there to support the handle during de-molding and shipping.

Impressions

Overall this is a well-done set. This set brings you some very common and necessary pieces and some more uncommon pieces, the kettle and tall coffee pot. Those are nice to see.

The sculpting is well done and shows nice attention to detail. The pots have handles; the kettles have spouts and nice handle detail. The depth of the pots is good. You will have the option to fill it with something or leave it empty.

I would say that you will want to be careful removing all the excess resin from some of these pieces. There are some very delicate parts that you don't want to over stress. So you will have a bit more clean up to do with these than you may with other resin kits. I honestly don't see a way around it, the way the molding process is done it's simply going to be a byproduct of this kit.

One other note to make relates to the 'loop' handles on the big pots and the bowls. They are molded almost closed on the big pots and as a solid block on the bowls. The handles on the lids are also molded as a solid piece. This won't bother or affect the vast majority of modelers; after all, the handles are there. For the minority of modelers who 'super detail' everything or scratch build everything, here is your opportunity to put your mark on this kit. If you find yourself removing all the grab handles on your AFV's and replacing them with wire ones, you can do the same technique here.

Summary

Custom Dioramics brings a well-needed kit to market. In my research I only found one other kit that could be considered competition. This is a great kit if all you need are the pots and pans to go with a field kitchen. The sculpting lends them to a wide range of time periods depending on the diorama. This kit is solid 'off the shelf' and will give a scratch/super-detailer something to do.




I'd like to thank Custom Dioramics for supplying this product for review.