Category: British aircraft
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Sopwith Camel – Part Four – Marking The Territory

And the next time I do, it will be with an incontinent dog. The colour scheme chosen for the Academy Sopwith Camel is the closest I could come to the preserved example in the RAF museum at Hendon. Working on the assumption that if any knew what a Camel would look like it would be…
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Sopwith Camel – Part Three – Decision Time

Decision time comes at many stages of a build – Shop, Shelf, Box, and Bench. For the desperadoes amongst us we can add the Screen. a. Shop. Which one to go to? The closest one? The one with the biggest range? The one who gets the newest kits in? The one with the best prices?…
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Sopwith Camel – Part Two – The Bagatelle Trap

How many times have you dismissed something as too minor to much concern yourself with? And how many times have you been proved wrong? The casual builder of this little Academy kit may well miss some of the joys of the universe if they take a flippant attitude. Admittedly, the cockpit is nothing at all.…
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Sopwith Camel – Part One – A Kind Gift

A gift camel. I feel like a middle eastern potentate. Actually a second gift Camel. One came from my friend Paul and one from my friend Warren. This latter one is the Academy kit, and as I’ve just completed a Revell WW1 fighter, I thought I would have a change and do the Academy. It…
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Bristol Bulldog – Part Six – Pip Pip Reggie

The Lockdown Bulldog was finished – and a day before time. Shows what you can do when you are doing what you can do… Someone – I cannot think who it was – gave the big horse laugh at US Navy and US Army aircraft of the 1930’s for being too colourful. He saw the…
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Bristol Bulldog – Part Four – Partial Masking

I cannot say that I look forward to masking all that much. But I recognise that it is an in-escapable part of aircraft painting in small scales. There are things you just cannot freehand with enough precision. This is hilarious considering some of the pictures I’ve seen of ground crew respraying aircraft in wartime with…
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Bristol Bulldog – Part Five – Plan Out The Paint

And I nearly didn’t. I was going along well with the painting and decaling of the Bulldog when I noticed that I’d jumped a gun – the instruction sheet showed the underwing report code being put on before the bomb racks. I’d long cemented and painted in the racks before I noticed this. Fortunately the…
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Bristol Bulldog – Part Three – Plane, True, And Plumb

Say what you will about super-detail kits and expensive models – you just cannot beat a kit that will go together cleanly with no strain on the components. Oh, we’ve all had kits where we’ve coped. Where we’ve managed to make one warp counteract another and end up with something that looks like the box…
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Bristol Bulldog – Part Two – Well, They Don’t Fly Themselves, Eh?

I’ll amend that. The drones do…sort of. But in the case of the Bristol Bulldog, it needs a human pilot to defend the realm. Airfix have been good to us for a long time – nearly all of their kits have contained at least one crew member to steer the ship and/or make the sandwiches.…
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Bristol Bulldog – Part One – Viral Week

We copped a 5-day lockdown here in Western Australia when Covid transmission occurred associated with a quarantine hotel. Which sounds trifling when you compare it to other places in the world that had been devastated. But we were in a legal and geographic position to take it seriously and did so. With a bit of…
