Category: adhesives
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Doing The Slovakian Jig – Part One

I cannot say when my new jig kits were shipped from the port of Pressburg, but presumably it was before the Covid shutdown. My wife was able to order them from BNA in Melbourne a week before Christmas and they arrived in time to sit under the tree. I spent Boxing day with a new…
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You Know Where You Can Stick It, Buddy

And wash your hands afterwards… I use all sorts of perfectly good adhesives for my modelling – cements, glues, resins, etc. And while they all have different formulae and different actions on the plastic models, they have one thing in common; I can make them go where they are not wanted. I have smeared every…
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The Difference Between Blazing and Blasé…

…Is generally time and experience. The more of these two you rack up the less you writhe on the rack. This applies to marriage and model building. I’ll leave you to deal with the first set of memories, but consider your experiences with your first plastic model kits. You were keen, you were fussy, you…
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Repairing Our Mistakes

If we repair our mistakes we gain a great deal of control over our modelling. And it can make us better workers. a. We recognise a mistake. This is better when we do it before we commit it…sort of dry-fit your way out of danger – but even if we have gone all the way…
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” Paint Parts Before Assembly “

” What? Instructions? We laugh at your instructions! Real men glue everything together first and then mask for a week to paint something! We don’ need no estinkin’ instructions… An’ as far as dat go, we decal before we paint. We decal any time we damwell feel like! Nobody tell us when to decal. An’…
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Grumman Goblin I – Part Five – The March To The Gallows

You can only put off unpleasant things for so long – eventually you have to face up to them and either conquer or be conquered. In my case the dread arose because of the cabane and interplane struts of this aircraft. True to their past form, the short-run moulders had made hardly any provision for…
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Grumman Goblin I – Part Three – Fuselage of Courage

The title of this column recognises that there is a certain stoutness of spirit required when you try to close up a fuselage, car body, or hull. The reality of what the plastic is going to do can be a lot different from the blandishments of the instruction sheet. I’ve written before about what the…
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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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Kicked In The Zip

Normally an unpleasant sensation, I found out today that it was quite all right. And I will be looking to do it again in the future. Now don’t get nervous, and stop wincing. I am writing about the use of an accelerant to get cyanoacrylate cement to set quickly. I have bought a bottle of…
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Martin B10 Bomber – Part Four – If I Want A Pretzel…

…I’ll go to the bakery. The production of a complex fuselage is…well…complex. And sometimes the strange shape must cause the final product to come out of the mould a little distorted. I suspect this was the case with the Martin B 10. There was enough of a warp to render it impossible to set all…
