Category: Australian aircraft
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Hillson Praga Air Baby – Part Two – The Human Dimension
Or perhaps that should be human dimensions. The small size of people reflected in the small size of aircraft. You wouldn’t think that with a lot of kits – the fighters, bombers, and transports of WW2 are a level bigger than their counterparts in the interwar period – and these again bigger than the WW1…
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Hillson Praga Air Baby – Part One – So Niche
Okay. Beats Me. Who in Prague has ever heard of Australia? Well, someone did. They sent out three of these little light planes before WW2 – probably because they had a manufacturing deal going with Manchester. The kit is on two sprue trees – one clear and one silvered. A tiny rime of flash but…
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CAC Boomerang – Part Four – Green And White
Readers of this column may be wondering why I build so few Australian aircraft. It is not that I dislike them – it is just that I know so little of them that I fear making errors. I know that other modellers are much more accurate and I respect their judgement. Yet I would not…
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CAC Boomerang – Part Three – Let’s Take Stock
The start of this build was unpromising. The cardboard box from Tasman Models had all the appeal of a damp surgical appliance and the instruction sheets looked like a practical joke. A Kiwi practical joke at that. It was the sort of kit that you sold on eBay if you were lucky, or bought on…
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CAC Boomerang – Part Two – Wrong
Cicero famously said that any man may be wrong but only a fool persists in error. I wish to state now that I was wrong in my judgement of the Tasman Models Boomerang kit and wish to change my mind. I thought it was going to prove an unbuildable thing – a mere box of…
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CAC Boomerang – Part One – The Pale Pachyderm
I’m glad that I am adventurous – for a person who doesn’t leave the house much. And I’m glad that I have friends who are also adventurous – it leads me to the sort of things I normally would not do. The Tasman Models 1:72 kit of the Commonwealth Aircraft Corporation’s native fighter plane of…
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The Commemorative Scheme
We’ve all seen one that we liked – and ten that made us wince. I mean the commemorative scheme applied to a current airplane in someone’s roster. It may be a warplane, a civil airliner, or a private plane. It might be an R/C model or a static one. But as soon as you see…
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Curtiss Shrike – Part One – Down From The Shelf
This Dragon Models kit of the Curtiss A-25-A has been sitting in Hobbytech for ages. In the early days I would have put it down to a high price…but this has been surpassed by Czech kits since then. Or to the odd-looking box art. But this is no worse than some Eastern European stuff. Or by…
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The Anorak And The Typo
One of the exhibitors on our stand at the recent WASMEX model show put out a series of delightful 1:48th scale fighter planes. They were RAAF and Luftwaffe types of the WW2. I cannot say who moulded the kits but by the time they had passed through the hands of the modeller, they were beautiful.…
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I Remember Air Travel…
And that lovely crispy bacon you got before the war… The local airlines used to get a yearly contribution from me to visit Sydney or Melbourne. Not last year, and not this one, and maybe not next year, either…but hopefully some year after that. I hope the Sandowne Park model expo is still going then.…
The Little World 