Category: 1:72 scale
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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…
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PZL Gull Wing – Part One – One Christmas

I get to choose my own holiday presents. The best way to do this is to go to the shops, buy them, and hand them over to the people who plan to surprise me. They do surprise me too – when they reimburse me. This was one of 2020’s lot – a Mister Craft cheapie…
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Please, God, Let It Be The Soda

A cartoon from my youth showed a man on the street outside a liquor store holding two paper bags. The bottom of one had given away and a bottle fallen out – smashed on the footpath. The chap had his eyes to heaven and the caption read ” Please, God, let it be the soda…”.…
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Wait For It…Wait For It…

The state government in Victoria has just announced that it will introduce legislation in 2022 to ban the public display of Nazi symbols in public. This sort of legislation exists in Germany, Austria, Poland, Ukraina, and France and has existed for quite some time. Exceptions seem to occur for museums or other institutions but the…
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Morane- Saulnier N – Part Three – Russian Silver

And Imperial Russian at that. The finest Fabergé egg I could make for myself. The sadness occasioned by ruining a model has disappeared ( though I still have a sin to atone for when next I come to a military vehicle…) and I can start my WW1 collection in fine style. I have avoided this…
