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Pure Colour
Means a pure, clean model with no moral deficiencies. You will be accepted into the company of saints. You may be able to use your halo as a building lamp. Or not, if you are one of those sort of people who just weather every surface in the house. There are advantages to using pure…
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Do The Kit Makers Set Traps?
Is your favourite scale model manufacturer playing with you? Have they moulded a practical joke in their latest offering? Are they laughing at you in the lunchroom? You may be forgiven for asking this unpleasant question if you have just opened a $ 250 kit that has three parts and a decal sheet made of…
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The Design Meeting At The Model Plant
They have them, I’m sure of it. All businesses have meetings, and they all stink. In the case of scale model moulding plants the most important decisions are taken at these meetings, and most of them are held just before lunch when everyone is too hungry to think straight, or just after lunch when they…
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Swedish Hampden – Part Four – The Trials Aircraft
One only – that’s all the Swedes ordered in 1935 – and it took three years to get it to Sweden. It was partly an experiment and partly a political football – the Swedish air force actually wanted Junkers bombers and eventually got them under licence. The single Hampden was never armed, but did go…
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Swedish Hampden – Part Three – What Colour Is Swedish Green?
Go ask at IKEA… Or look carefully at the greens in your paint rack and note which ones can be poured together into a bottle and shaken up. This is a good opportunity to get the last few drops worth out of stuff that needs replacement anyway. A vigorous thinner will blend them all together…
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Swedish Hampden – Part Two – Grey Is Better?
Hmmmm. I am unsure. Ask me later. The grey plastic of this Airfix Vintage Classic seems to have a different fel to it from that of the 2010 version I built. Harder, stiffer, and less warped. I have only found one shot shot and one sink and the short shot is in the perfect place…
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Swedish Hampden – Part One – An Excuse
A very good excuse… a. For a trip to the local hobby shop. b. To purchase a fresh Airfix ” Vintage Classic “. c. To use up the decals that I got with my first Hampden. d. To see if Airix have corrected the flaws of that first kit. I do not really expect (d.)…
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The Miniature Mind
The psychology of scale modelling rarely makes it to the pages of academe. Few papers and fewer theses are presented about the little worlds of the modeller. Monogram brought out a 1:12 scale kit of someone writing a sociology paper but it never sold all that well. Be that as it may, there is a…
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Casting About For A Model
Is a die-cast airplane a model or a toy? It all depends upon the person holding it. One thing – it will never be a flying model – die-cast metal is not aerodynamic no matter how hard you throw it. It will sit on a stand or on its wheels and please the eye, but…
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We’re All Human
And all prone to error. So it is not fair to laugh at someone making a commercial mistake; especially when the sin carries its own punishment. The thing to be careful of is not being a party to the process. I saw a shop where a number of extremely small kits were being sold at…
The Little World
Close focus on the world of scale models
