Category: 1:72 scale
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RCAF Hudson – Part One – At Long Last
I have skirted around the Lockheed Hudson for decades. My collection includes a Lodestar, a Ventura, and a Harpoon – all fun to build and successful finishes. Yet the basic Hudson has eluded me – until Airfix decided to revive a Vintage Classic. I’ve been haunting the red-box shelves in two shops for months –…
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Norcanair Bristol Freighter – Part Six – Manitoba
Winnipeg, actually. Remarkable place. When I was a child I spent a month there one week and I shall never forget it. The pills help, though… It is the site of the museum that houses CF-WCE – the Norcanair Bristol Freighter. Ex-RCAF, it served many years flying out of Saskatchewan to points north. Now it…
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Norcanair Bristol Freighter – Part Five – Winging It
At a certain point in the build, your new airplane becomes a nuisance. Up until then, it is a manageable fuselage, some tailplanes, and a pair of wings. Or many wings, if you are making a bi or tri-plane. All the parts can be kept in the original box. When the erection stage comes around,…
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Norcanair Bristol Freighter – Part Four – Mask, Spray…
Rinse, Repeat, repeat, repeat. It’s all your own fault, you know. You chose a scheme that has more than one colour and spurned the maker’s decal sheet. You could have done it as a prototype with bare metal, a works number, and be done in time for tea. But no, you had to pick something…
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Norcanair Bristol Freighter – Part Three – Goo-ing It
You have to wonder how we did it. I mean back in the last century when we built scale model kits and did not use putty to fill in seams. Were the kits seamless them? Were we blind? Was filling a gap considered a disreputable act? Well times have changed, and many of you have…
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Norcanair Bristol Freighter – Part Two – The Evitable
You can only put off the inevitable so long. Eventually it becomes horribly evitable and you either have to shit or climb off the pot. I finally had to start sawing on the Bristol. The vac-form plate was a surprisingly easy task. I’d YouTubed a group of modellers in Canberra who were discussing vac-form modelling…
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Norcanair Bristol Freighter – Part One – Airfix Again
And I could not be more delighted. Some years ago I purchased an Airfix kit for a Mk32 Bristol Superfreighter at WASMex. It cost a dizzying $ 10 and included a vac-form part for a new nose and tail assembly. I decided to build the Superfreighter in the original Airfix form and configure it as…
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Gloster Meteor F.8 – Part Two – IAF
And wasn’t that a clever idea, Great Britain? Selling Gloster Meteors to the Israelis and De Havilland Vampires to the Egyptians? Bit of export cash in the old exchequer, What? And a good leg in either bed, no matter who won, eh? Pip,Pip…! Looks like GB supplied Meteors to Egypt and Syria as well. Jordan…
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Gloster Meteor F.8 – Part One – Third One Out Of The Stable
Fate has dealt me three Gloster Meteor kits; a Cyberhobby F.3, an old Airfix III ( ? ) , and a new Airfix F.8. I have played the first two as best as could be – the first as an RAF plane in the 1945 conflict, the second as a corroded gate guard on a…
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Was It Edison?
Who said he had discovered 10,000 ways that you could not do something before he made a successful electric lightbulb? I feel like that sometimes dealing with the scale modelling world. Whether it is painting or moulding, soldering or carving, there seems to be a long and winding road always ahead of me. A case…
The Little World 