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Do What You Can

With what you have – where you are. This may have been Teddy Roosevelt’s line or it might have been from an earlier writer. Since I just typed it, it’s mine now. You are free to use it as you will. You have a kit in front of you – for which you may have…
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The Clean-Up

New year seemed to demand new experiences. Also new work. So I rather hurried to complete a model before midnight. It was not hard…just a small one. That meant that January could start afresh at the club with a new kit. The stash owner always has the problem of which to select. In my case…
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Atlantic Wildcat – Part Three – White And Grey

Like a West Point dress uniform. The Wildcat build started on Saturday and finished on Monday – with plenty of eating, drinking, and sleeping time in the interval. It was not the most complex nor puzzling kit ever built. But what a sweet model. There is a current air show Wildcat flying in North America…
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Atlantic Wildcat – Part Two – Look, Ma! No Instructions!

Do the wings go on the back or the front? Well, it was free. How can you complain at the lack of instructions with that in mind.? And how hard can it be to make a monoplane fighter? Not hard at all, as one afternoon at the bench showed. Even early Minicraft kits are good…
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Atlantic Wildcat- Part One – Older Than Dirt

But just as attractive. The is an Academy/Minicraft kit, which nails the age at 1996 – not really old at all, when you consider some of the fossils I have built. A donation, and welcome, but what should be done with it? Missing a canopy* but complete otherwise, with a spare tail plane and an…
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Disloyalty Is Not Allowed

Modellers are required to decide which nation in the Little World they will belong to and will not be allowed to emigrate to another. If you build plastic aircraft you will not be allowed to make wooden ships or doll houses. If you run trains you are not allowed to look up in the sky.…
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If I Seem A Bit One-Eyed For The Next Month Or So…

It is because I am having my eyes operated upon for cataracts. Today is the first day after the op on the left and things are very foggy out there. I cannot be trusted to drive or operate a bulldozer. I am already married so that eliminates the danger of contracting another for some time,…
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Less Can Indeed Be More

Well…more or less… This famous fashion dictum also applies to a lot of scale modelling. Those of us who model in smaller scales are often unable to apply the same structures or details that other people can achieve. We have to paint suggestions rather than cement on actual structures. We also spend less on individual…
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All My Best Models Cost Under $ 10

Because they are the poor, sad runts of the hobby shop litter – or the nearly-dead ones that just pass from stash to stash without ever getting built. I give them hope and dignity. I clip their parts off the distorted sprue trees without making noises of obvious disgust. I sand off flash and rivets.…

