Category: 1:72 scale
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Revell Brewster Buffalo – Part Three – Good Enough For the Dutch

Poor old Hollanders. They never seemed to have a good time of it in their wars. The English beat them off the sea in the 1700’s and the Japanese scoured them out of the Dutch East Indies in the 1940’s . I wonder if they have ever won anything? Perhaps they do when they retell…
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Revell Brewster Buffalo – Part Two – Dashing Away With The Smoothing Iron

I am nothing if not buoyant when it comes to really bad kits. It is the effect of cheerful optimism and iron-bound stupidity. I welcome a challenge…much as I welcome Redback spiders. Considered as an artistic thing, the port wing of the Revell Buffalo is rather elegant. It has a french curve to it. I…
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Revell Brewster Buffalo – Part One – Baggie Of Doom

They make a joke about the Shelf Of Doom on the Flory show…but we all know of kits that are headed there no matter what we do. The little Revell baggie containing the F2A model looked to be a prime example. It had resided in a hot and cold attic for decades before my friend…
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Pink Poles

Before you start to wonder if this has turned into a porno site, let me assure you it always was. But we were using code-words. If you didn’t get it, you weren’t the one the code was intended for. Now that we’ve got that out of the way, look at the two pink airplanes. They…
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MiG 17 – Part Four- The A-Team Moment

I love it when a plan comes together… The Egyptian MiG 17 sitting at Schmattarim Museum Is not the same as the one at Hatzerim Museum. Not at all. There is no Arabic writing on the nose. The wheels are still Soviet Green*. And it has not totally faded out in the Negev sun. But…
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MiG 17 – Part Three – Dam Those Wings

I have always thought that wing dams were an admission of error on the part of an aircraft designer. Yet they feature on any number of Eastern and Western jets – mostly the ones that have swept wings. You may know them as stall fences or barriers. They keep the air moving back past the…
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MiG 17 – Part Two – Smarter Than The Average Bear

Look here, Prague. The Russians – crude stumbling peasants that they are…drunken, covered in ice and angst…can make a cockpit tub that fits into the fuselage first time. The tub is a precise moulding and the partitions that hold it in place allow both sides of the fuselage to approximate without gaps. It’s almost as…
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MiG 17 – Part One – I Buy By Price

And I buy cheap. My trip to the hobby shop was for paint – of course I detoured into the kit aisle, and of course I looked over all the 1:72 offerings there. The shop is one that I rarely get to, so it may contain things not seen before. This was so, but while…
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Martin B 10 Bomber – Part Seven – The Japanese Raider

The original of this Martin B 10 bomber was not a hangar queen. Part of a 10-plane shipment to China, it and one other were the last of their lot as war took its toll. I get the feeling that there were issues with aircraft maintenance, airfield protection, and crew performance that gradually took out…
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Martin B 10 Bomber – Part Six – Far Side Of The Hill

And we know what colour that is because it featured in a folk song… The shade of green that the Martin B 10 wears as a Chinese Nationalist Air Force plane is speculative – there are a number of sources that insist upon olive drab and an equal number that place the hue closer to…
