135th Construction Battalion (a VLS Creations Company) ventures into plumbing with kit #
CO 0096,
Plumbing Fixtures (MEDIUM). This looks like another 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.
Inside the main bag is a small ziplock bag to further keep the fittings tightly packed. All are
easily visible from the front for easy inspection without even opening it up.
What you get
The kit is labeled “2 of each type per set” and that includes
- 2 “Y” connectors at a 45 degree angle.
- 2 “T” connectors at a 90 degree angle
- 2 open end caps (short)
- 2 bent corner sections at a 90 degree angle
- 2 shallow bend long length connectors
- 2 short straight connectors
- 2 shallow bend short length connectors
There are 14 pieces all together.
All are cast in resin. All of them come with the typical resin block. Some come on their own block,
others are combined with other pieces on a block. There was no flash on any of the pieces.
There was a bit of extra molded on resin on a few pieces.
Impressions
Like in the Drain Pipe Fittings review; you don’t see plumbing very often in dioramas. This is your chance to add some indoor plumbing to a diorama and really take it up a level on detail. There are a lot of pieces in this kit. It appears to be a nice mix of bends, corner bends, and end caps to do almost
any normal plumbing job.
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.
The MEDIUM designation represents the overall diameter of the pipes. The 135th Construction Battalion has
two other kits, one SMALL and one LARGE. I believe all can be used in conjunction with each other.
They have been designed with that in mind by the looks of all the connectors. This makes for a nicely integrated product line.
I tried to find competition for this series and had a hard time doing it. Available kits are hard to find.
In my discussions with other modelers they too agree that this kit fits a need.
This kit, as with the Drain Pipe Fittings kit (CO0101), is an idea generator. 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, and a bit of scratch building you can 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 Corporation for supplying this product for review.
