The Little World

I would love to read a definitive article on the plastics that we encounter in our model kit building. I suppose a lot of it is trade secrets and economic choices, but I think there would be a lot of interest in a scientific analysis of the various styrenes

In particular, please give us a table of comparison for the makers that currently mould – as well as the major ones of the past. I remember Revell USA, Monogram, MPC, Aurora, AMT, Airfix, Eagle, and many others. They sometimes had distinctive characteristics – density, hardness, flexibility, and odour. You never forgot the smell of a Revell B-36.

Now I encounter an even wider range of material – the flourishing oriental and Eastern European scene adds new players weekly – and they all have different plastics.

This is the sort of anorak topic that would be a natural for Britmodeller. People could fight over it, but in the end someone would post a table of all the various plastics, and we could choose our cements and glues more sensibly. We could recall the glories of the past as well as the disasters. And then someone could do the same for the cements… Oh, Lordy…

The PZL 24 is coming along well. The blobbish appearance on the sprue trees has been belied by the final fit – there are few intolerable areas. The details will be crude – plenty of scope for aftermarket improvement – but the cheap nature of the basic kit would make extra spending foolish. If you could make your own hollow cannon barrels or brass pushrods do so, but be aware that no-one but you will care.

The splotchy nature of the plastic is evident in the pictures – it’s not my camera. No-one will know it at the end but it does tell you something of the manufacturing process.