Category: airliner
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Handley Page Heracles – Part Four – Night Flight To Hyderabad

This aircraft model gave two choices of registration – G-AAXC or G-AAXF. I chose the latter – ” Helena ” and noted that it was assigned to eastern flights for Imperial Airways – when there was an empire in the east to fly to. As I intend to do with most 1:144 models in my…
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Handley Page Heracles – Part Three – Mask And Silver

I shall never understand the remark that someone once made about silver-finish aircraft being boring. The amount of work that goes into preparing a model for a silvered finish – and the sheer terror involved in spraying it – would seem to be enough excitement for anyone. Follow this with decaling and sealing and you…
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Handley Page Heracles – Part Two – Wings Over Wetaskwin

This kit build has nothing to do with Wetaskwin, but if you have been waiting for 60 years to use that line, you just go for it. The sprue trees that made up this kit looked like a picket fence – or a game of pick-up-sticks; there were that many struts. The box art was…
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Handley Page Heracles – Part One – A Present From The Past

I recently asked my daughter to pick me up a fresh model kit when she passed through Melbourne. There are several good shops there and she might encounter something new. Well, she was taken by something old – an Airfix vintage Classic re-issue of a 1965 kit – the Handley Page HP.42 ” Heracles ”…
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Use It Or Hoard It?

What do you do with the valuable old kit? If you have been stashing or buying for some time, you will eventually stumble across an unbuilt kit that is actually valuable in some respect: a. It has climbed in resale value as it has aged and other similar kits fallen by the wayside. If you…
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Silberner Blitz

There are some models that you build with polystyrene cement – others with wood glue. And yet others that are joined with anxiety. This is one such model – it was a superb bargain buy at a stash sale morning – and never better timed. I was on the lookout for 1930’s European airliners for…
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Airbus 320-200 – Part Three – Safely Flying

I was going to title the wrap-up post ” Safely Landed “, but then I realised that the gear was up… At the outset I must admit this kit surprised me. I expected little, but got a lot. There have been moments, but these were predictable, and the difficulties were surmounted. Difficulties? Not the fit…
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Airbus 320-200 – Part Two – A Curate’s Egg

And parts of it are excellent. So far the only cavil is a few lumps in the line of the engine mounts and a short-shot in a trailing edge. Sprue Goo takes care of the latter and a filing stick the former. The fuselage sides are a commendably close fit, and the clear cockpit windows…
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Airbus 320-200 – Part One – Box Scale

Here we go – doin’ things I said I’d never do again. Box scale, and a factory that has turned out some awful junk before… Be fair, me. It has only turned out junk when the moulds they bought from former moulders were time-expired. Some of them were junk in their first iteration, so they…

