Category: 1:72 scale
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The Proper Font Is Never There
I do my own decals in an inkjet printer for many of the 1:72 aircraft I build. It’s not that I am contemptuous of the commercial maker’s decals – far from it. I love Cartograf and other fine printing companies for they ability to make a good decal with thin carrier film and good moulding…
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Bristol Bulldog – Part Six – Pip Pip Reggie
The Lockdown Bulldog was finished – and a day before time. Shows what you can do when you are doing what you can do… Someone – I cannot think who it was – gave the big horse laugh at US Navy and US Army aircraft of the 1930’s for being too colourful. He saw the…
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Bristol Bulldog – Part Four – Partial Masking
I cannot say that I look forward to masking all that much. But I recognise that it is an in-escapable part of aircraft painting in small scales. There are things you just cannot freehand with enough precision. This is hilarious considering some of the pictures I’ve seen of ground crew respraying aircraft in wartime with…
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Bristol Bulldog – Part Five – Plan Out The Paint
And I nearly didn’t. I was going along well with the painting and decaling of the Bulldog when I noticed that I’d jumped a gun – the instruction sheet showed the underwing report code being put on before the bomb racks. I’d long cemented and painted in the racks before I noticed this. Fortunately the…
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Bristol Bulldog – Part Three – Plane, True, And Plumb
Say what you will about super-detail kits and expensive models – you just cannot beat a kit that will go together cleanly with no strain on the components. Oh, we’ve all had kits where we’ve coped. Where we’ve managed to make one warp counteract another and end up with something that looks like the box…
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Bristol Bulldog – Part Two – Well, They Don’t Fly Themselves, Eh?
I’ll amend that. The drones do…sort of. But in the case of the Bristol Bulldog, it needs a human pilot to defend the realm. Airfix have been good to us for a long time – nearly all of their kits have contained at least one crew member to steer the ship and/or make the sandwiches.…
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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 Six – The Ghost of Gleet Bay
One day FY-B…old No. 915…will be bobbing off the buoy at RCAF GLEET BAY along with the other floatplanes and flying boats of the Coastal Command. I am still working out in my mind a way of displaying these ships in the water without massive sea sculptures. Wish me luck. 915 represents a lot of…
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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…
The Little World 