The Little World

Or how to spend money with both barrels.

I have now started to take a scale modelling magazine each month at the local newsagency. This is great, because I was starting to lose faith in the publishing industry there for a while. I would run the racks and find nothing that could hold enough interest to justify the price. And that included nude picture books as well as the tamer literature. For a while there I was even tempted to the radical student magazines and the conspiracy theory stuff out of New Zealand…

Well, the scale modelling magazine I found is out of the UK and has a good mixture of plans and articles as well as advertising for the hobby. One can largely ignore this part as we are only ever going to see a small portion of whatever is available on the world market anyway…though Western Australia being what it is, things will show up here decades after they have disappeared elsewhere. For my part, I am going to be satisfied with whatever I can find on the local shelves and not go hankering.

Others evidently play the game differently…there are six solid pages of resin and brass kits in various scales designed to complement commercial kits. From the look of the prices, many of these aftermarket products are formed from diamonds and gold.

I’m not sure whether to applaud or hide behind the sofa. I do agree that some of the less expensive models ( the ones I favour ) can be light on detail in the cockpits, but in some cases that is charming. The thought of throwing more than the kit price into a bag of resin parts to trick this out seems somehow wrong.

Of course the extra details will attract more points from more judges…and if it’s a contest win you’re after there’s your answer. But you’ve gotta wonder whether you’ll ever peer in there ever again after it goes on the display shelf.

I do like the articles in the mag that show alternatives to kit markings. Full-scale listings of whoever flew whatever are helpful and if one of the decal printers has a set, you are cleared to taxi to the runway, so to speak.