Category: design
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Sikorsky H-19 – Part Four – Utility
I often used to watch a television program in the 50’s and 60’s called ” Whirlybirds “. It featured adventures and rescues centred around two pilots and a Bell 47 helicopter – the US Army Sioux. I realise now that Hollywood made the 47 do a lot more than ever it could. It is a…
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Sikorsky H-19 – Part Two – The Common Colour
In scale model building the two most common colours are Thewrong Green and Thewrong Grey. I have elected to use the first of these as the interior shade for the Sikorsky. It is related to the inside colour of USAAF planes and is likely to have carried over to Army and Marines aviation after the…
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What Story Does Your Model Collection Tell?
If it is only one model, it says that you are just getting started – and that it is lonely for companionship. Time to go out and buy another kit. This is when you start to have a voice in the narrative. If you buy another model kit in the same scale, but of a…
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Petlyakov Pe-8 – Part Six – Squeeze Me, Baby!
I feel like I’m going to split. The central bomb bay section of the Pe-8 dictates the spread of the fuselage. Had I not included the interior, and just decided to join the fuselage halves without cutting the bomb bay, all this post would not have happened. As it is, it did. as much as…
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Petlyakov Pe-8 – Part Five – A Wing And Several Prayers
I am never so nervous as when I see a plastic model aircraft with a multiple-part wing. I don’t mean a top and bottom – that’s normal. I mean a top and bottom outer, top and bottom inner, internal brace, wheel well, separate nacelles, and no cementing tabs. Add two gun positions and it starts…
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Petlyakov Pe-8 – Part Four – The Puzzle…
If you did not want me to do it, why did you provide the parts? I address this to the Amodel engineers who moulded a complete interior bomb bay and 250kg bomb load, and then left the fuselage doors moulded shut. Not shut with a line to score and pop out – completely moulded in…
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Petlyakov Pe-8 – Part Three – Stein’s Bomb Dump
And if that title doesn’t get me on an FBI list, nothing will. The explosives you see in the heading page are Soviet 250kg types – roughly equivalent to a British or American 500 pounder…though I don’t know if the fillings had equal explosive power. They will be attached to the bomb bay former and…
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Petlyakov Pe-8 – Part Two – Well, No Escaping It…
Sooner or later I was going to have to start the kit. The box had to be opened and the sprue trees taken out. All 870 of them…The AS truck had already been built as part of a Soviet airfield but the main monster remained. Amodels are flashy mouldings., and slightly friable plastic. Many of…
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Modelling Without Guilt
It’s rather like sex without guilt – fun, but a little bland. Not that you want to be pursued through bedroom doors and corridors like a Feydeau farce, but a little innocent concealment of the new kit makes for a frisson of excitement – even if it turns out to be the same old moulding…
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How Far Down Do The Rabbits Go?
And I don’t mean on the internet. How far down does a scale modeller pursue the business – at what point does the quest for detail stop? How about weathering and appearance? Where does the line of diminishing returns cross that of fatigue? I think it differs with the genre and scale of the models,…
The Little World 