Category: American aircraft
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Sikorsky H-19 – Part Three – Squish

I don’t know if joining the two hull halves is a stressful time for ship modellers. Listening to the noise from the bench at my scale model club would suggest that it is. I can feel their pain – I experience some of it each time I join two fuselage halves. Depending upon where the…
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Sikorsky H-19 – Part Two – The Common Colour

In scale model building the two most common colours are Thewrong Green and Thewrong Grey. I have elected to use the first of these as the interior shade for the Sikorsky. It is related to the inside colour of USAAF planes and is likely to have carried over to Army and Marines aviation after the…
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Sikorsky H-19 – Part One – So Many Choices

The Sikorsky S-55, or H-19 Chickasaw was a helicopter of many armies and air forces. The decal sheet of this Italeri kit provides for France, USMC, USCG, and Royal Navy. Other issues in the past supplied RCN and the USAF. Just a little googling suggests Indian Air Force, Turkey, Israel, and Chile are possible with…
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It’s Only Gotta Work Once

A cynical phrase, but perfectly true – if you are talking about kamikaze planes, nuclear bombers, or interceptors. The occasions upon which they are used to fulfil their dire fates are such that they only need to work the one time – but that needs to be done with a degree of success. No kamikaze…
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Boeing B17G – Part Two – Doodle Bug

There are very few steps to the average 1/144 kit – and if you walk fast… You get to the end very quickly. This Academy kit was started on Saturday and finished on Wednesday. That was not a deliberate sprint – it just happened to fall together with very little filling or sanding and a…
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Boeing B-17G – Part One – Academy

Or is that Minicraft? The box for this old B-17 lists both companies and a recent announcement from Academy in South Korea says that the assets of this older American company have been acquired by them. This box looks to be slightly old and slightly squashed and the instructions date the Academy sheet at 1992.…
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Where Is Your Thunder?

Did someone steal it? Did you give it away, again? Did you look into a modelling magazine or go to a website and find someone has beat you to the punch with their rendition of a scale model kit? Is the Framley-Hopkins ” Regurgitator ” biplane in your stash now just ashes in the box?…
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Angels

The second squadron of Plasticville fighters. My purchase of three Plasticville airport hangars some years ago added more aircraft to the pile. For a while I thought of them as US naval jets, but a Plasticville on-line forum identifies them as Douglas X-2 Skyrockets. I think this is right, but it didn’t stop me from…
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Lockheed S-3A Viking – Part Three – I990’s

The chief raison d’être for the S-3A was hunting Soviet submarines in the 1970’s and 1980’s. With the 1990’s and the Reds beaching most of their fleet. the plane was reconfigured for surface surveillance and attack and garnered war honours in several conflicts. The ability to haul bombs and rockets as well as targetting gear…
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Lockheed S-3A Viking – Part Two – Cut And Glue

And really – that is all there was to it for the day. Some jobs are too hard and some too easy. The Hasegawa Viking fell into the space between these two extremes, and I am not complaining one little bit. When surfaces fit without fettling, when there is enough space for the nose weight,…
