Category: Czech models
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Siebel Si 204A – Part Four – The King’s Airplane
The interval between today’s post and the previous Seibel Si 204A one was a surprisingly brief one. I owed this to my experiment with refraining from the Facebook feed. The amount of time lost to sitting in front of a screen staring at advertisements and fake questionnaires seemed to amount to more than an hour…
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Siebel Si 204A – Part One – The RRA’s New Airliner
The Royal Ruritanian Airways occupies and envied position in European aviation – it has never had a crash landing. This is not to say that there have never been hurried ones, or landings that haven’t strained the oleo struts to their squeaking maximum – but so far every touchdown has been on the tyres –…
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Resin – Do I Love It Or Hate It?
My return to scale aircraft modelling these last few years has brought me into contact with one of the most interesting materials on the market – polyurethane resin. It is not the first time that I’ve dealt with building plastic – I worked with acrylic polymers and monomers as a dentist for 40 years and…
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Heinkel He70 F-2 – Part Two – Methinks I Doth Smell A Ratte
And it may be a Ukrainian ratte at that. The kit has just been started – the cockpit tray completed and some preliminary wing work to box in the wheel wells – and already I am suspicious that this kit has Eastern European origins. Or at least Middle Europe. Middler than Germany, at any rate.…
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Douglas A-20 Havoc – Part Seven – The Work Of Art
Masking tape is one of the few artistic mediums overlooked in the catalogues of the famous galleries. Yet it is the chosen vehicle of expression for so many of us. And it is such a transient thing – here one hour and stripped off and thrown in the trash the next. Truly a metaphor for…
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Douglas A-20 Havoc – Part Five – Just Because Someone Was A Fool…
…Doesn’t mean you have to follow them. This might be the phrase best suited to the stage of building that we are up to today – the landing gear on the A-20 Havoc. It is tricycle gear and the original designers of the ship wanted to make the wheels and tyres disappear from the airstream…
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Douglas A-20 Havoc – Part Four – I’m Starting To Like…
Well, I am starting to like the Havoc. And not just the plane itself, but the new materials and techniques I’m using on it: a. The plane itself is interesting – the pronounced dihedral and the cant of the tailplanes looked to be daunting when seen in plans, but the makers of the kit have…
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Douglas A-20 Havoc – Part Three – Subassembly Time
The Douglas Havoc by MPM models ( are they the same as Special Hobby? I’ll have to Czech up on that…) is old school in that it is all injection moulding – no resin or brass to confuse the issue. I welcome this but will have to do some cheap detailing in the cockpit if…
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Douglas A-20 Havoc – Part One – Search The Sprue
I’m starting to know how to play the game – at least recognising some of the new rules. It’s changed since the 1960’s… Back then, plastic model kits gave you only a very few choices – the AMT 3-in-1 cars had extra parts that you could glue onto them to make racing cars or customs.…
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Why The Czechs?
Or why the Ukrainians, Poles, or Russians? Why the Chinese? Why has plastic scale model manufacturing become such a big thing in these countries? And why did it move so much from the original base in the USA? Why did the US companies sell up to overseas investors? It cannot be because the population of…
The Little World 