Category: American aircraft
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Douglas Skyhawk – Part One – The Experimental Craft
Never mind your Bell X-1 – your Douglas Skyrocket, X-3, or X-15. I’ve got a real experimental airplane. One on which I intend to try out new things, hell, Hay, or bust. The canopy of the A-4D was missing from the kit. I needed to make a new canopy shape so that I could weather…
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Ryan Spirit of St. Louis – Part Three – In Soviet Union…
Decals put you on. On the spot, on the griddle, on the booze. I’m going to give the Novo factory a pass on this one – and for all I know they are long gone. They may have done their best at the time. Unfortunately the time was the 1970’s and 80’s and this is…
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Ryan Spirit Of St. Louis – Part Two – Lonely
Well, he is lonely. But to give FROG/Novo their due, he is a pretty good representation of Lindberg dressed in period flying gear. He gets three slightly foggy windows to peer out of and a hard plastic seat, but then the real aircraft has a wicker seat in it that doesn’t look much better. The…
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Ryan Spirit Of St. Louis – Part One – Nyet, Tovarich…
Is not could be Spirit of Amerikan town. Is Spirit of Leningrad. First solos transatlantic airplane fly from Soviet home of revolutionary peoples but capitalistic newspapers disguise this. Soviet union always first in everything. Well, not quite first with this model. We get mould from FROG in decadent England and hero workers of Soviet Union…
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Douglas DC-3 – Part Five – Et Voila
There is a lesson to be learned with this Airfix model of a DC-3 in Aéronavale colours – and I must compel myself to learn it. It is a lesson of humility. At the start I thought this a marginal model – the sort of ugly cousin kit from an old company that had been…
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Douglas DC-3 – Part Three – The Airfix Channel
Well, I’d watch it if they started broadcasting, and so would you. But this is not about the television – it’s about the Airfix channel that they put between the fuslage and inner wing panel of the DC3. It is so far the widest gap this side of Darien. Not on both sides of the…
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Douglas DC-3 – Part Two – It Fits Where it Touches
I am trying not to be discouraged by the Airfix DC3/C47 kit. I have chosen wisely to make it into a closed kit – the door fitting on the port side is truly appalling. Or perhaps I am looking at it from the wrong perspective – in the original form it has three mini-guns and…
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Douglas DC-3 – Part One – The C-47
‘Well, duh. Of course it’s a C-47, because it is a Douglas DC-3. And It’s a DC-3 because it’s a C-47. And it’s a Vietnam-era gunship in this Airfix kit courtesy of four Air Force figures and a cargo floor that sports a number of mini-Gatling guns on stands. I’m afraid it holds little place…
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Martin Maryland – Part Three – SAAFies Again
Remember the SAAF captured Junkers 52 that I made a couple of years ago? Well now it has a companion in the Desert Air Force. K for Kaffir – the Martin 167 Maryland of the South African Air Force. A lot of the SAAAF Marylands were camouflaged with middle stone and darker brown, but I…
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Martin Maryland – Part Two – FROG Spawn
Well, I wasn’t wrong about the origin of the model – but I noted some interesting features on the sprue trees. Some were perfect and some were not. A Forrest Gump box of chocolates, indeed. The fuselage and wings are wonderful. The tail plane likewise. The design features a set of long tabs that lock…
The Little World 