Category: Czech models
-
Bellanca Pacemaker – Part Four – PE P/O
Or what to do when you cannot get your hands round the throat of the person who designed the kit. I make no complaint about the mould-cutting shop. Or the injection plastic line. The design department are mostly blameless as is the decal office. My venom is reserved for the acid-pocked faces of the photo-etch…
-
Vultee Vanguard – Part Five – Hint of Wings To Come.
Look closely at some lines on this Vultee fighter and mentally add a bent wing and bigger engine. Yep. It would have been interesting to see what might have been if the later Corsair was available for China in the early 40’s. lad-based aviation would have been less critical in landing than naval service and…
-
Vultee Vanguard – Part Four – Mind The Gap
Fitting an eastern European model together is like opening Forrest Gump – you can never tell whether you have a soft centre or not. In the best kits the parts fit, and in the rest they nearly fit. You are fortunate if the gaps are symmetrical and the surfaces parallel. Plastic strip and sheet can…
-
Vultee Vanguard – Part Three – Hate, Loathe, And Despise
If I told you I hate, loathe, and despise kits that have separate blades and hubs for their propellers you might get the wrong idea. Many 1/72 planes have this feature and the two, three, or four-bladed props sandwich in between a hub and a spinner and end up looking fine. I reserve my negative…
-
Vultee Vanguard – Part One – Stash Sale Star
The acquisition of a Vultee Vanguard was one of those serendipitous moments – a stash was being thinned, the sales day was ending, the owner was marking things down, and I had $ 15 left. Now the painful part – the decision whether to assign this one to the USAAF, the RCAF, or the Nationalist…
-
Kawanishi Norm – Part Four – A Powerful Flop
From all accounts great things were expected from the Kawanishi reconnaissance float plane. And then the contra-rotating propellers and jettison-able float proved problematical and the service missions undertaken with the type were failures. So it was quietly shoved back into a training role. The appearance of the aircraft in the box art was what attracted…
-
Kawanishi Norm – Part Three – Sprayin’ Weather
This last week has been good weather for spray painting. Clearish, dryish, and warmish…enough to be able to manage lacquers with regular thinner and also spray rattle cans of clear. The shop heater has been on to make a warm box but this is less of a problem now that I have overcome my fear…
-
SNCAN Martinet – Part Four – Swedish Spy
That might seem a bit harsh, but the decal on the side of the fuselage and the Wikipedia entry both identify this post-war aircraft as part of the cartographic services if the Swedish government. They may have flown over Sweden mapping, but they could also have been taking vertical pictures elsewhere. There are several internet…
-
SNCAN Martinet – Part One – A Siebel By Any Other Name
Christmas was coming to the hobby shop and it was time to choose my present. In this case before the actual day, so I got a fresh choice. The SNCAN Martinet was a Siebel 204 produced in France during the occupation and afterwards. It was used by the French air force and then sold on…
-
Timing…
A ticka, ticka, ticka…Good Timing. A tocka, tocka, tocka. If you model by the clock you’ll never go wrong…until Daylight Savings starts or your Big Ben falls off the bench. Then you’ll be back to counting up to one thousand before letting go of the cemented parts. The intrusion of time into a hobby is…
The Little World 