135th Construction Battalion (a VLS Creations Company) ventures into plumbing with kit #CO 0101, Drain Pipe Fittings (MEDIUM). This looks like a well needed kit.

Packaging

When you receive your kit you will get a small baggie with a hard stock header. It’s about 2”x3”. There is a nice, very solid, heavy card stock piece inside the bag to give it support against breakage and for nice solid display of the parts inside. All are easily visible from the front for easy inspection without even opening it up.

What you get

When you open it, this out comes:

• 2 long straight pipes, each 2 ¾” long


• 2 end sections 5/16” long


• 2 medium bend


• 2 end sections with a small “T” intersection


• 2 end caps 3/32” long


• 2 low bend


• 2 right angle/corner bend connectors

There are 14 pieces all together.

All are cast in resin. All of them come with the typical resin block. There was no flash on any of the pieces. There was a bit of extra molded on resin on a few pieces. The medium bend is maybe a 70 degree angle and the low is maybe a 50 degree. I am not a plumbing expert and am not 100% sure what the origin of the angle is. So these angles could be the converse and be 110 and 130 respectively (hence the medium and low bend designation in the parts list).

First Impressions

I know you’ve seen dioramas where the inside of a building is destroyed. You typically see floor and ceiling beams. You see the inside of cinder block walls. You see plaster and lath exposed etc etc. You sometimes see electrical wiring. How often do you see the plumbing?????? You don’t see it very often at all. This is your chance to add some indoor plumbing to a diorama and really take it up a level on detail with this kit. The pieces in this kit are nicely combined. It appears to be a nice mix of bends, corner bends, and end caps to do almost any normal plumbing job. The long pipes are molded with a small receptacle piece to fit inside the ends of the connectors to give you a nice tight fit.
I mentioned the extra resin on a couple of the pieces. No big deal, you can either sand it off or leave it as if some kind of weld was overdone or there is some kind of hard water build up on the joint.

Details

My impression of why there are only two straight pipes and so many end/connector parts is this: you can more easily replicate or scratch build the straight pipes. You can use a coffee stir straw for a pipe easily. The reward with this set is the well molded connector ends. They really do mimic real life pipes as you can see in the sample image. These connectors and the bends are the hard thing to duplicate. Those make the asking price worth it.
The MEDIUM designation represents the overall diameter of the pipes. The 135th Construction Battalion has two other kits, one SMALL and one LARGE. All can be used in conjunction with each other. They have been designed with that in mind by the looks of all the connectors. The end pipe with the “T” connector is one such ‘matching’ piece. The “T” piece is a SMALL diameter pipe while the rest are the MEDIUM. This makes for a nicely integrated product line.
This kit is not just an internal drain plumbing product. It can be used for exterior rain drain pipes too. I have included one (small) image of what you can duplicate with this. You can do the vertical pipes that carry rain from the roof to the street. I could have used this product for my diorama “Door to Door”. The vertical section of the green drain pipe I scratch built could have been much more easily replicated with this kit.
I tried to find competition for this series and the kits available are hard to find. In my discussions with other modelers they to agree that this kit fits a need.

Summary

This is an idea generator kit. You will see things in a diorama that you never saw before. You will consider options that weren’t there before adding this kit to your arsenal. With this a bit of scratch building you lay down a lot of pipe. This is one of those kits that pushes your good diorama up to the next level. You won’t be disappointed. This one gives you that extra detail you were looking for and lets you integrate your scratch skills with some after market products.




I'd like to thank VLS Corp for supplying this product for review.