Category: American aircraft
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Stealth Aircraft – Part Two – Painting The No-See-Um
I’ll bet you’re just itching to know what a No-See-Um bite feels like… The colours of the F 117 and the B2 are quite different, though in both cases the paint is part of the circus trick. The night attack aircraft is very dark grey/black and the strategic bomber nearly as dark, but with gradation…
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Stealth Aircraft – Part One – The Unseen Gift
The 1/144 scale kit for the B2 bomber and the F-117A fighter snuck up on me at the modelling club. Rick Slattery presented them to me as a gift – he usually concentrates upon larger scales – and I was delighted to take them. I am starting to appreciate this simplified scale as a way…
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Looks And History
This so often devolves into ” or ” rather than ” and “. Aircraft are designed by people with different senses of aesthetics. Add to this the different operational requirements, purchasing wishes, and actual manufacturing ability, and you can see why there have been so many flying duds. In some cases the crash of the…
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Douglas Skyraider – Part Two – The Five-Point Shot
Photographic shot, that is. The acquisition of a new Fujifilm camera with a touch screen has led to adoption of a new procedure for scale model photography. I can now doe focus-stacked images much more easily. It’s not my invention – it’s been going on for ages -but now it is very simple for tabletop…
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Douglas Skyraider – Part One – Abandoned On The Shelf
Started, but incomplete. Very low price – my kind of kit. And a definite prototype in mind for the finished build. The previous owner had cemented the wing and fuselage halves together and done a pretty careful and precise job of it. The kit is designed so that the cockpit tub slips inside before the…
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US Navy Phantom II – Part Three – Repeated Masking
Sometimes I make work for myself, and sometimes people make it for me. This Airfix US Navy scheme is really quite simple – the top light gull grey and the bottom white – but the navy decided to complicate things by painting some of the flying surfaces in white as well. Indeed they also apparently…
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US Navy Phantom II – Part Two – The Sixties Return
In my case, without the hair… I don’t care – if the era came back with half this much success, I would be delighted. So far the old Airfix Series 3 kit is doing very well indeed. The basic structure went together at one afternoon session. However, it was never going to go together without…
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US Navy Phantom II – Part One – Airfix Series 3
This older Phantom came as a part of a legacy sale. It is a Series 3 Airfix kit – boxed, and from 1965. Even if the actual production of this box was in later years, that’s a long time, and the instructions, decals, and moulding are bound to have suffered. Since then, of course, many…
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Finnish Brewster Buffalo – Part Three – 1945
Let us be delicate about this… In 1945 the Finns were on the winning side of a losing war. Actually several wars. They had fought the Soviet Union on their own behalf, as partners with nazi Germany, and then fought the Germans for their own territory as part of the Allies. It was a situation…
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Finnish Brewster Buffalo – Part Two – All In A Day’s Play
I have given up days of work. Now I slave away at a hobby… it is much more trouble… And I should not have it otherwise. I can remember employment and practice and professional education and have no desire whatsoever to go back and re-commence them. If I had to do it all over again,…
The Little World 