Category: 1:72 scale
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Avia S-199 – Part Six – A Messer By Any Other Name
As soon as I saw the photographs of the Avia S-199 in Czechoslovakia and then later in Israel I knew someone was fooling with me. The propellor gave it away. It was a cartoon propellor from a Daffy Duck movie. I mean, who would put as big a prop on a plane like that…? Well…
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Avia S-199 – Part Five – ” Daddy, Why Is that Man Swearing? “
” He’s an aircraft modeller, Dear, and something has gone wrong. ” The something started out going right. I managed to print out a sheet of Magen David emblems on the epson on strips of masking tape. I then transferred the tape to a cutting board and carefully made the roundels and the stars as separate…
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Avia S-199 – Part Four – Ol’ Stripey Tail
I appear to have learned something from my past experiences with Israeli fighter planes. This time I did not attempt decals for the rudder, electing instead to paint the 101 Squadron stripes. They have been very successful, and tempt me further to try to paint the rest of the ID stripes and Magen Davids rather…
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Avia S-199 – Part Three – What Colour Is The Colour Of An Argument?
Answer: Whatever colour you ask about in a modeller’s paint forum. I went to my computer to google someone else’s opinion about the grey/green colour of an S-199 in Israeli service. I encountered scholarly works that deteriorated into name-calling and vulgarity. I did not see any profile pictures of the writers but I can pretty…
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Avia S-199 – Part Two – The Old Grey Mezek
She ain’t what she used to be. The 199 had the name of Mezek in Czechoslovakia – that meant ” mule “. In Israel it was officially a ” Sakeen ” or ” knife “. It was unofficially a Messer…which is pretty good because that means ” knife ” in German and it was the…
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Avia S-199 – Part One – The Mule Cometh
I have been on the look-out for a year for a 1:72 model of an Avia S-199 fighter plane. Wouldn’t you know…a call at the local specialty shop for another product ( which I couldn’t get ) and a browse on the shelves led to the wonderful discovery. It was not a cheap kit, but…
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Tail Feathers
I have always been curious about anything connected to the decoration of aircraft. Look out your picture book of WWII aircraft and turn to the RAF section. Note the insignia applied to the average fighter or bomber: a. Two upper wing roundels in red and blue – in some cases quite dark but quite large.…
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Boeing B17 – Part Five- The Fat Lady From Wenatchee
Well, it has been a week. The Fat Lady From Wenatchee is finished and I am delighted – so much so that I will now deliberately seek out other aircraft that can be made into civilian service aircraft. There were severe forest fires in Washington State and British Columbia in the 1970’s and a number…
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Boeing B-17 – Part Four – Bombing A Different Enemy
As soon as I asked Google to show me B-17’s in Canada I got all the old RCAF pictures I had already seen, plus lots of USAAF shots. And then down at the bottom of a long search something new started to pop up. The civilian B-17. A few had been converted to private planes…
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Boeing B-17 – Part Three – A Slight Detour
My projected mail plane needs to lose the upper and ball turret. The Academy people have not supplied blanking plates for these two gun positions so I need to occlude them with some scratch building. However, I started out with the basic cockpit and bomb bay assembly. The interior is supposedly chromate green according to…
The Little World 