Category: Colour Schemes
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Tail Feathers
I have always been curious about anything connected to the decoration of aircraft. Look out your picture book of WWII aircraft and turn to the RAF section. Note the insignia applied to the average fighter or bomber: a. Two upper wing roundels in red and blue – in some cases quite dark but quite large.…
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Boeing B17 – Part Five- The Fat Lady From Wenatchee
Well, it has been a week. The Fat Lady From Wenatchee is finished and I am delighted – so much so that I will now deliberately seek out other aircraft that can be made into civilian service aircraft. There were severe forest fires in Washington State and British Columbia in the 1970’s and a number…
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Boeing B-17 – Part Four – Bombing A Different Enemy
As soon as I asked Google to show me B-17’s in Canada I got all the old RCAF pictures I had already seen, plus lots of USAAF shots. And then down at the bottom of a long search something new started to pop up. The civilian B-17. A few had been converted to private planes…
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Boeing B-17 – Part Three – A Slight Detour
My projected mail plane needs to lose the upper and ball turret. The Academy people have not supplied blanking plates for these two gun positions so I need to occlude them with some scratch building. However, I started out with the basic cockpit and bomb bay assembly. The interior is supposedly chromate green according to…
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The Cockpit – Part Three – The Pen Is Mightier Than The Canopy
You’ve read before in this column about using a drafting pen as an instrument to paint the frames of a model airplane canopy. It is a perfectly valid technique – and one that I use all the time. If I am going to attach the canopy later with PVA glue, I can sit with it…
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The Cockpit Tapes – Part Two – Liquidation
Okay. You have looked at your 1:72 scale bomber and decided that you do not want to spend another $ 23 on pre-cut masks and you don’t want to spend a week trying to cut your own. What’s the alternative? Microscale, Humbrol, and GSI Creos would have you believe that painting a liquid mask on…
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Do Not Cock Up Your Pit – Part one – Wear A Mask And Talk Dirty…
Or ” Keeping the windows clean in a shit storm “. If airplanes were built like army tanks ( and some, Like the A-10 Warthog – are…) we modellers would have an easy time of it. Indeed if pilots were not such wusses and kept on insisting that they needed to be inside out of…
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Seriously Successful Decals
I’ve written before about the traumas of trying to get old decals to work – and failing miserably with some of them. But now I can brighten the day – Even 1959 decals can be brought back. There is a little of the Transylvanian laboratory about it, but you can do it. All you need…
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Tupolev SB2 – Part Four – ” Red Is The Colour…”
” Of my true love’s national aircraft recognition insignia in the morning, as I rise…” This was an aviation folk song that Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie tried to promote in the 1930’s but it never really got off the ground, despite a headwind. Even when they offered to strike every Friday and bus in…
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Tupolev SB2 – Part Three – The Gallows…
I never realised how much my painting stand looked like a gallows tree until I hung the Tupolev SB2 on it for undercoating and colour coats. Didn’t mean to be quite so morbid… But the fact that the SB2 was suspended there and took its paint so well pointed out the basic utility of the…
The Little World 