Category: design
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Stealth Aircraft – Part One – The Unseen Gift
The 1/144 scale kit for the B2 bomber and the F-117A fighter snuck up on me at the modelling club. Rick Slattery presented them to me as a gift – he usually concentrates upon larger scales – and I was delighted to take them. I am starting to appreciate this simplified scale as a way…
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RCAF Wellington Mk II – Part Four – It’s No Sin To Fill
But it’s no great honour, either… I’ve no idea if Tevye built model airplanes, but if he did, he would have been philosophical about it. For my part I accept the inevitability of gaps and defects and the need for a good fill and sand. AIrfix, on the other hand seem to have decided to…
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Have I Got The Latest, Latest Kit?
With the photo-etch and the resin and the masks and the pots of paint and the signed copy of the designer’s baby photo? Gee, I hope not; I don’t think I could stand the pressure to perform. The 14th coat of weathering oil/lacquer/authenticity magic would reduce me to tears. I could not win a court…
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The Mark II Had The Window On The Left
And they never painted the underside blue. And so starts another anorak dogfight. The two combatants have both seen pictures of the Fosdyke-Heppelberry ” Flapdoodle ” in RAF service and both are convinced that they are the recognised experts on the type. Both are unwilling to give up the title. The pictures they have seen…
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Dewoitine D.500 – Part Two – Aeronavale
It is a pity that the development of the French Navy’s air arm was cut short by being the country being defeated on the land. It would have been interesting to see them engaged with the Italian Navy in the Mediterranean. As it was, the two sides might have been evenly matched. This version of…
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Vickers Viscount – Part Two – Dry Fit Morning
When a kit has 18 parts, you do not need to spend much time building… One morning at the club, with time out for coffee and a slice of cake ( We celebrate birthdays in the correct style…) was all that was needed to assemble the major components of the Viscount. The surface of the…
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The Odd Model
Occasionally you encounter a scale model kit that has as its primary characteristic…oddity. It may be a remarkable rendition, well-moulded, with good instructions and a decent decal sheet, but the basic thing is so strange as to make you, and most of the buying public, shy away. It is the kit that sits on the…
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Scale Model Puzzlement
And not the jig-saw kind. I mean the sense of uncertainty and curiosity that arises when you see certain aspects of our hobby. Here is a list of head-scratchers:
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Norcanair DC-3 – Part Three – A Return To Sanity
One can only build obscure European designs from the 1930’s so long… Eventually your gall bladder starts to complain. There is only so much weird and ugly that it can take. A French bomber in the block-of-flats style tends to stretch the imagination past the snapping point – eventually you have to return to reality…
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Such A Simple Idea
So effective. The decal box was a gift from my friend John – he is a constant shopper on Temu and other Asian hobby sites. As a scale model builder himself, he is razor-sharp when looking for tools and paints. This was a real find. It is a plastic box, fitted with a fine-grain foam…
The Little World 