The Little World

Or ” How I Learned To Glue My Fingers Together Blindfolded “.

I have been engaged in building a card model from a Superquick kit. This is a bus depot that can moonlight as an airplane hangar. The makers even provide spare signage with an aviation theme.

The kit is largely die-cut. Most of the components are attached to their sheets by only a few uncut nibs and these are quickly dealt with by Xacto knife. The amazing part of it is the graphic design that has laid out any number of building elements side by side. You cut one free and another is ready for use at the same time.

The precision with which they are made is surprising. I’ve not found one part badly made in the entire packet – though some need a bit of fettling if you have not bent a joint tightly enough.

Some internet forum participants have compared this model maker unfavorably with another English one; Metcalf. I have no experience with the other but I’ll say that I certainly appreciate the Superquick experience – two days and I have a wonderful period garage cum hangar. The edges are precise enough to stand alone, though I did take the hint and painted them  to match the surrounding bricks or concrete.

Close shots show that it is what it is…but this level of detail is more than enough for my photographic purposes. And I am going to closely examine the catalogues and the shelves of the shops to see if there are any more structures that could – by any stretch of a modeller’s imagination – be planted on the Alberta prairies.

There were a lot of oddities out there – and some of them were decidedly British. Even in Calgary we used to see what we used to call ” Englishmen’s Follies “. We always assigned them to what might have been Canadian remittance men. May were half-built. But some were complete, and in the brick building style of the eastern provinces or the British Isles. I suspect that they were hell to heat and worse to live in. Some of their style was seen in the older school buildings.

The RCAF went in for brick in the 1930’s whenever they could get enough government money to build an air station. I would imagine those buildings would have survived a long time…more because it would cost money to pull them down and rebuild them than for any architectural purpose.