Category: American aircraft
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F-82 Twin Mustang – Part Three – It’s All Clear
And that’s not a good thing… The pretty looking set of canopies with this Special Hobby kit were superb. Clear and precise, with well-defined framing. I was looking forward to painting them – perhaps masking them in place for a change. As with all anticipated pleasures, it attracted the attention of a malign universe. One…
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F-82 Twin Mustang – Part Two – Czech Out The Fit
I know what Forrest Gump felt like sometimes – particularly upon opening a Czech kit. The box of czecholates that you get can have hard centres, soft centres, or centres with no positioning tabs whatsoever. You will be challenged. In the case of the Twin Mustang the fit of the cockpits was actually reasonable –…
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F-82 Twin Mustang – Part One – SOOTB Interception
I had no idea I needed it… Until I stated googling the business of North American air interception in the late 40’s. I identified an interceptor base near to where I once lived and looked over its roster. I was amazed to find the F-82 and to read that it was an effective unit. Then…
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Grumman Guardian – Part …Well… The Only Part
I confess. I got greedy. I started building and just couldn’t stop. I didn’t even take build photos. But in the end, I fell back exhausted and satisfied. I had scored a definite win in the game of scale modelling. I had contemplated this model kit for a year at a local shop. The emotion…
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SPAD XIII – Part Four – Rickenbacker’s Ride
The historic enthusiasts of WW1 can make of Eddy Rickenbacker what they will. His 22 aerial victories and 4 balloons downed are not the numbers that rival other aces, but he survived till the 1970’s and that was a definite win for him. The SPAD appears from other accounts not to have had quite the…
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Revell SPAD XIII – Part Three – Tri-Tone Again
My old nemesis – three-coloured camouflage – rears its attractive head again. This is a love-hate relationship. I do love the way the planes look once they are successfully painted and I do hate the extra work to get to that stage. The ones that have either a fracture pattern or a swooping one are…
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Revell SPAD XIII – Part Two – Grinning And Bearing It
Well, it is a vintage kit… The Revell SPAD XIII is going to look good, I tell myself. The large dollop of Mr. White Putty cut with levelling thinner is only to be expected. Also the superglue run into the tail gaps and the Vallejo squirt putty elsewhere. I have not reached for a tin…
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Revell SPAD XIII – Part One – A NZ Mystery
They don’t generally do impenetrable mysteries in New Zealand. Most of the country is pretty straightforward. Which means I have no idea why the instruction sheet from this unopened example of a New Zealand Revell baggie should have a corner bit out of it. Was there some secret there? Some corporate message that we were…
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Curtiss SBC-4 – Part Two – In Praise Of Heller
It is unfashionable in the British Commonwealth to speak well of the French. The old prejudices born of war and ambition stretch back as far as William the Conqueror and have been topped up and re-aligned every century since then. It goes the other way, of course – the French despise the English nearly as…
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Curtiss SBC-4 – Part One – The Old Photo In The National Geographic
I used to pore over wartime copies of NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC. I found a trove of them in a school library in the 1960’s and read all I could. I wasn’t after pictures of native girls with bare chests – I wanted colour photos of fighter planes. NG had access to the US Navy and Kodachrome…
The Little World 