Category: 1:35 scale
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Soviet ZIS-5 – Part Two – The Truck Factory

Well, that’s what it feels like as you sit at your bench with a kit of this type. You are working in the factory. This same feeling was encountered years ago with a 1:24 scale kit of a Bedford fuel tanker made by Emhar. They obviously had an original vehicle to base the model upon,…
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Soviet ZIS-5 – Part One – The Red Army Truck

I have been the recipient of a very kind gift yet again – this Hobby Boss model of a Red Army ZIS-5 truck was purchased in Singapore at a very good hobby shop and came to me at a very advantageous price… The box art is stirring, but the basic truck looks plain. Inside, however,…
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Sherman Tank – Part Five – Aberdeen

And not the one in Scotland, either. Aberdeen Proving Ground, Harford County, Maryland. The US Army testing facility. There’s another one at Dugway in Utah, but you don’t want to stand downwind of it… The Zvezda kit provided decals for the Aberdeen tank, so it got the nod. That meant that it could be very…
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Sherman Tank – Part Four – Aha, A Flaw!

And I did not think I would find one in this Zvezda kit. One of the mufflers is missing. The plastic stock box yielded a bit of Evergreen tube and its end was sealed with Milliput. Simple. Every other blessed part fit perfectly – and spending a day making the bogies was a real pleasure.…
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Sherman Tank – Part Three – Batch Processing

” Batch processing ” is the term we use in photography for editing one image perfectly, then commanding a computer program to make all the rest in the job the same. It saves an immense amount of post-processing time. ( Working with really lousy images is known as son of a batch processing…) It is…
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Sherman Tank – Part Two – A Different Market?

Am I seeing a kit made for a different market from the previous Zvezda tank? It was a Josef Stalin II and might have been more popular in Russia than in the west. This Sherman might be the other side of the coin. And the sophistication of the kit might reflect an expectation of more…
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Miniature Demicturation

Or ” taking the piss out of someone with the hobby “… I have been guilty of just this – with written articles in my web column and imaginative labels on some of my display models. So far no-one has exploded in rage, but I still have hopes. But have I done so with any…
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The Sparkless Stash…

Or the stashless spark. Is it better to have no kits but brilliant plans, or plenty of kits but no interest? There are any number of people with big stashes who lack the motivation to build anything. They look listlessly at the shelves of plastic in boxes and nothing at all calls to them. It…
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Triumph Herald – Part Five – We’ll Get To It When We Can

Just park her down the back of the shop and leave the keys in the ignition. And so the Triumph Herald arrives at Ess Bend Engineering. Stranded with a Lucas electrical system and a Coventry carburettor, she will eventually be reworked to Canadian standards. Many of her sisters will suffer the same fate in the…

