Category: American aircraft
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Who Decides And How Do They Do It?
I walk the kit aisle in the local hobby shop and wonder about the choices that have been made – and I’m not sure about all three tiers of retail trade; manufacture,selling, and buying. The maker of the plastic model kit needs to make a fair few of them with a profit upon each sale…
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Curtiss Tomahawk – Part Three – New Mistakes
I am going to learn every trick in the painting book by making every mistake in the painting book. But this build’s blunder was a very minor one that yielded to the simplest of repairs. I needed a red fuselage band just in front of the tail assembly for the AVG P-40. Loathe to try…
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Curtiss Tomahawk – Part Two – With Teeth
I am shameless. Absolutely shameless. I am abashed to admit how shameless I am… I stole images off the internet. And I did not pay anyone for them. I needed a shark mouth for a Curtiss P-40 plus a set of Nationalist Chinese roundels and I just went to Google and found one. If you’re…
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Curtiss Tomahawk – Part One – De Sales, Boss! De Sales!
Boxing Day Sales are a potent lure for many people in the town – if they have been abstemious during the pre-Christmas rush, have not over-indulged at Chrissie lunch, and are not trying to clean the house …they can rush out and try to buy the things that the retailers weren’t able to flog off…
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The Gift Buffalo
And you never look a gift buffalo in the mouth… This little gem was left on the modeller’s table at the club one week along with another 1:72 model under a sign: ” Free, please take “. I didn’t feel I could make good use of the other Japanese airplane but I knew that the…
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Yes, They Really Did Think It Was A Good Idea
And I, at 7, agreed with them. This was in 1955 – just after the suspension of the Korean War, and just at the start of the Cold War – at least the start in our local area. In truth, it had been going on since 1945 but the locals did not realise it. The…
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Piasecki Army Mule – Part Two – Army Mule = Navy Retriever.
The Piasecki H25 Army Mule helicopter was not a very big lifter – even for a twin-rotor aircraft. None of the helicopters of the 50’s period were – they were limited by what their aero engines could do. The H 25 has a twin-row radial engine buried in the fuselage, but it is a small…
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Piasecki Army Mule – Part One – Buy Me, Boss…
Trolling the aisles of Hobbytech recently I was feeling discouraged – they’d had a big Christmas and sold off a lot of goods – but there weren’t many small kits left that fit my criteria; cheap, simple, and a western prototype in the propeller or early jet eras. I wasn’t able to spend big on…
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Bell Iroquois – Part Two – It’s ALL Insides
The new Bell Iroquois helicopter is proving to be a series of revelations – occasioned by the fact that I have not seen inside a helicopter since 1961 – and that was one with a giant perspex bubble on the front and a big piston engine. It would appear that the advent of the gas…
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Bell Iroquois – Part One – The New Currency
Move over, Dollar. Step aside, Euro. Bitcoin, I laugh at you. I have my own medium of exchange now. I am no longer tied to your paltry numbers. I am accepting payment in model kits. Recently I took a series of portrait photographs for a friend at his request. Rather than charge studio rates to a…
The Little World 