Category: 1:72 scale
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Bristol Bulldog – Part One – Viral Week

We copped a 5-day lockdown here in Western Australia when Covid transmission occurred associated with a quarantine hotel. Which sounds trifling when you compare it to other places in the world that had been devastated. But we were in a legal and geographic position to take it seriously and did so. With a bit of…
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Red Sky At Night – Airbrusher’s Delight

Or was that in the morning? It’s so hard to tell with these old folk sayings. The people who say them to you are old folk and they generally forget what they came in the room for anyway… I had no idea when I embarked upon a life of chromatic crime – also known as…
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Supermarine Stranraer – Part Five – A Headache?

Faced with the choice of undercoats for the Stranraer, I may have chosen the hard one…white. I use Mr Surfacer 1000 of most of my models and appreciate the smooth grey satin finish it gives. I frequently forget to check it carefully enough for disruptions, but that is carelessness on my part – not a…
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Supermarine Stranraer – Part Four – You Can Glue…

With your fingers crossed. This is the normal mode of operation when cabane and inter-plane struts are concerned. With Czech kits the legs are also intertwined and you run the risk of falling sideways off the stool in the workshop. Matchbox made the process a little less fraught by sectioning the upper wing in three…
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Supermarine Stranraer – Part Two – The Green Lizard

Well, that’s what it looked like… The fit of the Matchbox Stranraer fuselage was exemplary. I needed no filler on the centre seams at all. The dorsal gun area, however, needed some careful fairing in to look realistic. That’s a heavy covering of Mr. Hobby white putty you see in the heading image and it…
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Supermarine Stranraer – Part One – Matchbox March

The Flory modelling group are going to embark upon a fun build every year – Matchbox March. They intend to build the classic old Matchbox kits – some with enamel paints – much as they might have been done in the 70’s and 80’s. I intended to follow along myself with one of Paul’s stash…
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PZL Gull Wing – Part Four – The Brown Gull

The aircraft depicted by this model was a sample put out by the PZL firm to promote sales to other air forces. It seems to have been taken up by a number of Balkan and middle eastern countries and used on both sides of WW2. Whether it was a successful fighter I cannot say, but…
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PZL Gull Wing – Part Three – Those Decals

Okay, let’s talk dirty. I’ll start. Polish and Russian decals. Sorry to be so brutal, but the topic needs addressing. In the past I have wished to address the makers of some Polish, Ukrainian, and Russian plastic model kits and send them the sheets back with suitable curses. The problem has not so much been…
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PZL Gull Wing – Part Two – Polish Plastic

I would love to read a definitive article on the plastics that we encounter in our model kit building. I suppose a lot of it is trade secrets and economic choices, but I think there would be a lot of interest in a scientific analysis of the various styrenes In particular, please give us a…

