Category: design
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Do The Kit Makers Set Traps?
Is your favourite scale model manufacturer playing with you? Have they moulded a practical joke in their latest offering? Are they laughing at you in the lunchroom? You may be forgiven for asking this unpleasant question if you have just opened a $ 250 kit that has three parts and a decal sheet made of…
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The Design Meeting At The Model Plant
They have them, I’m sure of it. All businesses have meetings, and they all stink. In the case of scale model moulding plants the most important decisions are taken at these meetings, and most of them are held just before lunch when everyone is too hungry to think straight, or just after lunch when they…
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Swedish Hampden – Part One – An Excuse
A very good excuse… a. For a trip to the local hobby shop. b. To purchase a fresh Airfix ” Vintage Classic “. c. To use up the decals that I got with my first Hampden. d. To see if Airix have corrected the flaws of that first kit. I do not really expect (d.)…
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Israeli Phantom – Part Two – The Curate’s Egg Revisited
One does not look a gift Phantom in the intakes. However, one sometimes observes that the makers of the kits may over-reach themselves. They break up a design into mouldable parts but fail to tell their mould-makers to talk to each other at the time. There are a number of interesting points of difference in…
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Short Skyvan – Part Three – Once Seen…
Never forgotten – provided you photograph it. The inclusion of detailed interiors in scale models is not new – this Short Skyvan kit had a full set of seats for Olympic Airways passengers in the 70’s and benches for Austrian skydivers in the 2020’s. When my example served as an arctic transport in the 60’s…
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Short Skyvan – Part One – Never Saw It Coming
Which is remarkably short-sighted of me – this thing is as wide as a house trailer. And as long and as high. In fact, if it had an oil stove and a porch you could take your muddy boots off in, you could park it in Peace River for the winter… Never before have I…
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Start, Ya Bastard
You know, I am unable to convince some of my North American readers that there really is a product on the market in Australia called just that? Oh ye, of little faith… As it is, the expression serves perfectly as a reminder to scale modellers that the kit on the shelf is just a box…
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Canadian Dandruff
Or how to freeze your enthusiasm… At some stage of the game every scale modeller thinks it would be ” cool ” to make a snow scene. The big film studios have been doing it for years – some with great effect. Nothing says Eastern Front like a half-track with the crew starting a fire…
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The Swedish Curse
Cold winters. Long nights. Trapped in the hangar with nothing to do. Add an active crew in the paint shop and an account down the local Bunnings paint department… And there you go. Camouflage schemes that involve 45 different colours with hard lines and geometric angles. And every modeller who wants a Viggen or a…
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Scale Model Envy
Sin in miniature. I rarely give way to envy at the scale model exhibition – even in the competition hall when most of the entries are far better than I could do. But I did come over all goosey when I saw this model of a Cletrac airfield tractor. It appears to be in 1:48…
