Category: 1:72 scale
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Macchi MC.200 Saetta – Part One – The Lawyers Called, Mr Chang.

I can see that there has been a phone call from Italy. Hobby Boss has put out their 1:72 model of the Macchi MC-200 Saetta fighter plane with no reference to ” Macchi ” on the box. It is referred to only as ” Italian ” and ” Saetta “. It’s the same story as…
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Mustard On The Side Of The Plate

The English firm Colman’s made their fortune in mustard. There’s probably a biblical analogy in there somewhere, but the idea that always stuck in my mind was that they really made their fortune on the amount of the product that people left on the side of their plate. It’s strong mustard; we all take too…
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The Longest Day

No, it’s not another D-Day memorial blog. You can wash the black and white stripes off your computer monitor… It’s a post about which day in the build of a model is the easiest – which is the hardest – which the least enjoyable – and which is the one you like the best. As…
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How Many?

I live in Perth, Western Australia – the furthest west that you can get before the world resets and it becomes east again. We’re where the wagon train either stops or gets extremely wet.. Our town has sheds, workshops, hobby rooms, garages, and minor factories all over the place – nearly every back yard has…
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Ticking Them Off

Ticking them off is ticking me off. I mean the various means for producing camouflage paint schemes on model aircraft. Recently I tried the Silly Putty Snake method for making British A and B aircraft patterns. I had two pots of different brands of silly putty and had researched all the YouTube videos on how…
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Bristol/Fairchild Bolingbroke – Part Four – The Coastal Command Wing

I have been delaying publication of the Bristol/Fairchild Bolingbroke final photos for several reasons; the weather is cold, the paint is slow to dry, and I have been making mistakes. Fortunately, not the sort of errors that are irreversible. The colour scheme of the Bolingbroke is taken directly from the Avia book I mentioned in…
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Bristol/Fairchild Bolingbroke – Part Three – Are We Hobbyists Or Detectives?

I bought the Avia book about Canadian aircraft of WW2 on a whim at Hylands Bookstore in Melbourne earlier in the year. Hylands is a peripatetic purveyor of printed matter – I have been to 4 of their premises in the CBD of Melbourne over the decades and each time it has been a unique…
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Bristol/Fairchild Bolingbroke – Part Two – If It Ain’t Bolingbroke…

In a reversal of other people’s normal behaviour patterns, I commenced doing the Bristol/Fairchild Bolingbroke before I had thoroughly researched it. I was going on an illustration in an Avia book about Canadian aircraft of the WW2 period and the one I wanted seemed to be similar to the Bristol Blenheim Mk IV. As this…
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Bristol/Fairchild Bolingbroke – Part One – Mark Another One Up

I knew this was going to happen, but I didn’t know it was going to be so soon. I am repeating a build. No. I am repeating a build to a certain extent. I am doing what the prototype manufacturers and the air forces did – making the aircraft that developed from an earlier mark. In…
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Decal Day

Well, I knew it was coming…I knew it when I saw the sheet of transfers in the kit – when I bought the extra packet at the plastic model fair – when I googled up all the various marques of plane that had the same name as the one a’ building. I knew that I would…
