Category: design
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The Home Printer
A guide for the scale modeller. I have long come to grips with the business of home printing. It started in the dear old darkroom days of film photography and locked the family out of the bathroom/darkroom many a night. Now we are digital, they can get in at any time, and I just sit…
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Consolidated B-24 D – Part Three – Take That, Ya Basket!
A new selection of things to add to my least-favourite kit experiences. Don’t get me wrong – after smoothing the lumpy exterior of this old Revell casting, the parts have gone together pretty well. I used the progressive cementation method and the workshop clamps coped with the complex forces needed – the fuselage and wings…
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Consolidated B-24 D – Part Two – The Toxic Rivet
Or should that be noxious? Whatever, the exaggerated rivet detail on this old Revell kit is probably what causes it to be rejected by the modern builders. Yet, under the spotty exterior is a pattern of decent engraved panel lines. I researched other’s efforts and found one ambitious chap who sanded the rivets off entirely.…
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Lockheed Ventura – Part Two – Assembly LIne
Well, it worked in Burbank – it’ll work in Bull Creek. I tackled the Lockheed Ventura in two club meetings as well as here at home by the simple process of parcelling it out into sub-assemblies and assigning them to places where the work could be done with the most facility. This was exactly the…
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Junkers D.1 – Part two – The Devilling Detail
I’m never quite certain with superdetail, and even less so when the model kit that delivers it is on the bargain shelf. Am I being told a tale? Will the parts come off thee sprue trees in one piece? Will they fit? Does the design of the kit follow the design of the prototype? Roden…
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Junkers D.1 – Part One – The Tin Shed
I remember seeing a photograph of a Junkers D.1 on the Western Front many years ago and thinking that it was like a Christmas Bullet – a fake flying machine made out of a corrugated iron shed. No, apparently, and now here is Roden serving me a 1:72 model of it for my WW1 shelf.…
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The Stoics Guide To The Little World
For stoics, if problems exist outside, they have ways of dealing with them, inside. The stoic dips very rarely into the pool of external anxiety, and then only briefly. Their first step is to determine whether some event truly affects them or is the affair of another and can be safely ignored. In our hobby,…
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” Model Not Recommended For Novices “
I have seen this on reviews and appended to the end of kit boxes. It warns the unwary that the designers have exceeded their dosage again and moulded up something that is near-on impossible to build. It is even more poignant when it appears next to a completed model – making you wonder if somewhere…
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When Physics Doesn’t Help
There is a rule in motion picture production when using scale models in action scenes; fire and water won’t work. Not that it isn’t done…but it is very rarely done well. The physics of fluids mean that scale ships never sail as well as real ones. A miniature explosion always gives itself away. Note that…
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LeO 45 – Part Three – The Unseen Hand
Ooh. Sounds like the title of a Sax Rohmer novel, doesn’t it? Well no, but don’t let me stop you from suspecting villains lurking in the dark. Some of them were responsible for this kit. The idea of masking off the canopy and nose area with the clear plastic parts that would eventually be cemented…
The Little World 