Category: British aircraft
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Heinkel He 111 – Part Five – On Your Feet

I am always eager to get a plane on its feet. And then I’m not, when I look and see what the manufacturers have moulded. So many of them make a set of landing gear that can never support the plane and is miserable to install. It is one of the stations on the model-building…
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Miles Magister – Part Three – Yellow And Silver

The Miles Magister will join my club of planes that look like they can fly right – sweet, sleek craft that give confidence in their aerodynamics and do not depend upon brute force to heave themselves off the ground. Aircraft that swoop, not lurch. I do like some of the cruder planes as well, but…
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Miles Magister – Part Two – Square and Solid

Well, I was right about the RS Magister – It is a nice kit. As there is so little to do in making it – though it is by no means a Hobby Boss production – the assembly is not boring. Of course there is the PE to deal with but even that is simple.…
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Miles Magister – Part One – Cute And Clean

Every so often you need to have a change from heavily-armed warplanes or state-of-the-art jets. You need something small and simple and bright. You need a trainer. Of course the real things were all this and more and perfectly able to kill instructors and students who made mistakes…but that is not what I am intending…
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Bristol Beaufighter – Part Four – EE-U

It is not often I get to build a model of a different real aircraft. Of course the makers of the kits pattern them off real ones that they find in museums – and these can be built from the box. But if you do, you are just building what everyone else who has purchased…
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Bristol Beaufighter – Part Three – The Principle Of Opposing Forces

Relax. This isn’t a political philosophy book. It’s still about plastic airplanes. The warped Airfix Beaufighter fuselage has been tamed. It took all day to do what might have been accomplished in a half hour, but we were on lockdown and time was elastic. The warp in the fuselage also warped the perception of how…
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Bristol Beaufighter – Part Two – Ce N’est Pas…

Ce n’est pas de plus beau… Oh, it’s a Beaufighter all right, and a marvellously complex moulding design. But someone in India pulled it out of the mould early and hot and it cooled on the bench. So the two halves of the fuselage have taken their own particular set – and the interior floor…
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Bristol Beaufighter – Part One – The Beginning Of A Beautiful Friendship

I’ll just round up the usual suspects… I can’t think why I have not pulled a new Airfix Beaufighter off the shelf at Hobbytech sooner. Goodness knows they have had them for some time – both this version and a later model with a radar…
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Hawker Sea Fury – Part Four – Perfect Paki

The PM model of the Hawker Sea Fury is just done and onto the photo table. It has been a symphony of pleasant surprises right from the start. And it’s a good lesson for the modern modeller – particularly the person who hangs on every internet report and thinks that there are experts who know…
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Hawker Sea Fury – Part Three – If You Look Very Carefully…

And I did. I did look carefully. And I’m glad I did. The external fuel tanks of the PM Models Hawker Sea Fury fit together very well. A lick of MEK, a clamp, and they were ready for sanding. And not a lot of that needed – the seams fit very well. As I had…
