Category: 1:72 scale
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Lockheed Ventura – Part Three – Shiny Is As Shiny Does
And you can’t tell a paint by the tin. The ugly bug in the heading image had just received the third colour of a standard RAF day bomber scheme and was waiting to be de-husked. The masking was, if anything, worse looking than usual, but for a good reason. The worms were standard but the…
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Lockheed Ventura – Part Two – Assembly LIne
Well, it worked in Burbank – it’ll work in Bull Creek. I tackled the Lockheed Ventura in two club meetings as well as here at home by the simple process of parcelling it out into sub-assemblies and assigning them to places where the work could be done with the most facility. This was exactly the…
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Lockheed Ventura – Part One – Stash Mistake
At recent scale model exhibition – the 2024 WASMex show – I rushed out to the stash sale tables as soon as the doors were open. I am always concentrating on 1:72 aircraft so I can spot the boxes on the tables quickly. In the case of this model I saw it snuggled down in…
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Well, Hello Masking Fluid
Goodbye putty worms. My Facebook feed has just put up a reel of the world’s only flying Avro Anson Mk I in preparation for take-off. The shot is of the starboard wing, engine, and nose. The colour scheme is the standard RAF Dark Earth and Dark Green. And all the colour edges are sharp lines.…
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Junkers D.1 – Part Four – Does What It Says
On the tin… I wonder what the Junkers man said to the first German test pilot who climbed aboard old No. 1 and settled down into the corrugated metal? ” You von’t stick your finger through zis one, Herr Baron…”. While I find the vertical tailplane to be somewhat agricultural, the rest of the structure…
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Junkers D.1 – Part Three – Gerry And The Wrinkles
Sounds like a geriatric pop group, doesn’t it? In this case it is good old Junkers and their good old metal folding mill. They had an idea and they stuck to it, and we are stuck with it. Don’t get me wrong – I understand the principle of the corrugation and applaud it in fences…
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Junkers D.1 – Part two – The Devilling Detail
I’m never quite certain with superdetail, and even less so when the model kit that delivers it is on the bargain shelf. Am I being told a tale? Will the parts come off thee sprue trees in one piece? Will they fit? Does the design of the kit follow the design of the prototype? Roden…
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Junkers D.1 – Part One – The Tin Shed
I remember seeing a photograph of a Junkers D.1 on the Western Front many years ago and thinking that it was like a Christmas Bullet – a fake flying machine made out of a corrugated iron shed. No, apparently, and now here is Roden serving me a 1:72 model of it for my WW1 shelf.…
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When Physics Doesn’t Help
There is a rule in motion picture production when using scale models in action scenes; fire and water won’t work. Not that it isn’t done…but it is very rarely done well. The physics of fluids mean that scale ships never sail as well as real ones. A miniature explosion always gives itself away. Note that…
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LeO 45 – Part Four – Art Deco Bomber
People who google images of this French early-war bomber may see something stuck underneath it. There is a dust-bin turret that drops down from a position just aft of the cockpit to allow an unfortunate crew member to fire a single short machine gun at attackers under the plane. It is included in the kit,…
The Little World 