Category: 1:72 scale
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Schmattarim
Stop groaning. It’s my model airport and I get to make the jokes. Actually, it’s a museum layout – a very useful way to display a variety of aircraft. In this case they are Israeli, and the idea is patterned on the real IAF museum at Hatzerim. I’ve built enough models to mount two separate…
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Razzle Dazzle ‘Em
And you don’t even need to use bright colours. This year’s scale model exhibition opened itself to new groups – and in the case of the first stand in the hall it was a wargaming outfit that built a magnificent set depicting something of the Battle of Berlin 1945. The set components were a mixture…
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Do You Advance?
Is each build making you a better modeller? It can, if you let it. If you learn one new technique, or have one new disaster, or accomplish one new task each time you complete a kit, you are on the road to success. Hopefully, you will not reach it – else what’s a Heaven for?…
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Fairey Battle Mk I – Part Six – Jarvis, Ontario
No 1 Bombing And Gunnery School RCAF. The Battle was used extensively in Canada as a training aircraft and target tug. Kept well away from the Luftwaffe, its only enemies on the prairies were the cold, the students, and gravity. Slow, heavy, but a good flier for limited purposes. The RCAF even fielded a variant…
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Fairey Battle Mk I – Part Five – The Hangin’ Tree
I am not a naturally cruel man, though I have trained in the art… Nevertheless there is a certain grimness about constructing a gallows on which to execute a model airplane. You start to think of Sidney Carton or Till Eulenspiegel… The advantage of it all is the ability to spray from all sides in…
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Fairey Battle Mk I – Part Four – Broken On The Wheel
In Prague they have a tradition of throwing difficult people out of third-story windows. Look it up. I can certainly agree with this when it comes to scale model designers who decide to make a resin hub and separate injected plastic blades for a propeller. I should be happy to set punji stakes or hungry…
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Fairey Battle Mk I – Part Three – Got It Taped
I have been trying a new procedure in my aircraft builds; dry-taping. It is at the dry-fit stage and allows me to build up a phantom of the cemented assembly and add more parts to it. I can catch cockpits wedging the fuselage sides apart before committing to them – it is hard enough sanding…
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Fairey Battle Mk I – Part Two – The Paradox
How can a short-run moulder be so good at making injected parts… And then make so many bad resin ones; detailed resin panels that are meant to fit precisely. ” Meant ” is a curiously elastic word. I have been making two cockpit tubs from this Czech kit – they involve sides, back and top…
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Fairey Battle Mk I – Part One – At Long Last
Knowing that the Fairey Battle was used by the BCATP in the 1940’s meant that I was always burning to find one. Well, the coal fire went out at the Airfix works a long time ago, and nothing was seen here until an advertisement for a new Czech mould appeared earlier in the year. This…
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Making Water On The Workbench
And in cold weather, too… I needed a harbour with water – dry water – to display my float planes. No good just posing them on a glass shelf like dried cod – they needed to look like they were in their natural element. No time, and no inclination, to do the complex water-building that…
The Little World 