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Pilatus PC-21 – Part Three – The Double Mask

The look of this Swiss trainer in RAAF service is a bit daunting – all that colour and complex markings. Yet, like every paint job in the world, it yields to careful study of individual parts. You just have to mentally look past the complex decals to the basic colours – red, blue and white.…
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Pilatus PC-21 – Part Two – My Faith Rewarded

Remember I said I was confident in the new Swiss kit? Well, it is getting better. A dry-fit stage is not a perfect thing – you can miss slightly less obvious gaps and misalignment…only to have them show up and bite at cement time. However this time it looks as if the cockpit tub fits…
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Pilatus PC-21 – Part One – Serendipity

The definition of the word links random occurrences that produce a beneficial result – in short good luck. It has started for me with the donation of this new kit. The firm that makes it – 3D Blitz Models – seem to be Swiss. This will be one of the few occasions when I have…
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You Cannot Educate The Ignorant

Not with a scale model – so don’t set yourself up for disappointment. The public display of scale models of any kind is best done to other enthusiasts. They will be critical of your work, but generally sympathetic enough to see what you are trying to show. Joe Soap who just slings along with nothing…
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Making A Public Exhibition Of Yourself

This is not as dire as it sounds. Of course the upright, uptight, upper class Victorian would never do it…but then they never did. They reserved their showing off for a funeral cortege and a statue in the local gardens. I plan on two show-off shows this year; one at the annual scale model festival…
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Seeing The Remnants All In One Place

Is good for the mind and bad for the soul. Or the other way round… The big boxes full of little boxes – in their turn full of unbuilt plastic kits saved from the wreck of a Perth hobby shop – that greeted me at my hobby club were an amazing sight. Part of the…
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Queen Mary – Part Three – Hughes Transport

Or what to do with a wartime leftover… If it is a plate of powdered egg scrambled with Spam, consider how many decades have passed since VE- Day,,,If it is an old QMT, also consider what time has done to wartime metal construction – particularly British metal with British engineering. The QMT trailer is marked…
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Queen Mary – Part Two – Club Afternoon

I frequent two hobby clubs: The One You Admit To and The One You Conceal. To be fair, I change the designations around from month to month so that everyone can feel uncomfortable… The heading image is the amount accomplished at one 3-hour session. Airfix were precise and sensible when they wanted to be; you…
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Queen Mary – Part One – ” Can You Use This? “

Whenever someone says this to you, reply ” Yes, please…thank you. ” . It doesn’t matter whether they are offering you a gold Rolex or a tin of condemned beef – take it. You can decide what to do with it later – the offer and acceptance is the fulcrum of friendship. This Queen Mary…

