Category: design
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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…
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De Havilland 60 G – Part One – Too Long On The Shelf
Actually, too long on several shelves… This model was purchased at my favourite local hobby shop to rescue it from obscurity on the back shelf. It had lain there – along with a number of obscure Soviet experimental and propaganda ships – for as long as I had been going to the place. Finally they…
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I Asked About The Difference…
Between fantasy and science fiction, and the chap with the space helmet, ray gun, and rocket back pack just shook his head. So did his four-headed dragon, and that was a messy business. Took us half an hour to put out spot fires. In the future, I shall just observe the future from a distance.…
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4-D Printing
The new art of 3-D printing is flooding into the scale modelling world like a bottle of cement tipped over onto the cutting mat. If you move fast, you can rescue your kit from it…any delay will see you stuck to the workbench. Well, not that exactly…but you cannot ignore the new technology now that…
The Little World 