The Little World

It’s always good to set limits for yourself – to make a set of rules about what you’re going to do, Then when you do just the opposite you can wallow in guilt.

I wasn’t going to spend money at the 2019 WASMEX exhibition because I was going to save it all for Melbourne’s show. Then I started flipping the decal packets and hit a rescue version of an RCAF Lancaster. And found the box of re-issued Airfix RAF personnel. And attended the Sunday morning swap meet.

In my defence, I do have a master plan that includes all the kits I am looking for to build my RCAF airfields. And this Canadair Sabre is on the post-war list. And I realise that it is a ten-year-old kit that is unlikely to be re-issued.

It is not pristine…but then neither am I. The box has been biro’d by some child and there are a couple of parts off the sprues. The cockpit tub has been glued together, but nothing more done to the parts or decals. I checked the lot before I popped for the $ 10 price. My subsequent examination of the bits in detail hasn’t shown any bad things, so I am delighted with the deal.

Then I flipped more decal packets and came across something that I would not normally take an interest in – the planes of a display team.

I’m not a fancy paint chap. I prefer service paint, albeit neat and clean, to the spectacular show paints that air forces load onto their aircraft for display, Quite frankly I think it looks garish and unnecessary. But it has been a feature of the aviation world for the last 6 decades at least. The reason the decal set caught my eye was that it was Canadian, fitted the Sabre jets, and was printed with enough variants on the one sheet to allow for either multiple builds or multiple failures.

This last feature may actually come into play. The decals, for some confusing reason, are printed in reverse. You wet them, lay them onto the surface, then peel the paper away from on top of them. To get a white element into a design you apparently have to lay a separate white decal before the main coloured one. It sounds daunting but the kid selling them assured me that it was easy. And he further stated that they would send back-up sheets if the first ones failed.

Well, in for a penny…