Category: design
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SAAB J22 – Part One – Small And Cheap
And it doesn’t come with meatballs or an Allen wrench. Here is yet another newie for me – a genuine Swedish home-grown fighter moulded in Lund, Sweden. Box long gone, but the top and sides preserved to give a colour reference. The plane is a well-designed stop-gap Swedish product along the lines of the CAC…
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Douglas Skyray F4D – Part Three – Good For One Thing
And very good, at that. The Douglas F4D Skyray was built to intercept Soviet bombers as far away from American aircraft carriers as was possible. This was in the mid 1950’s when the threat from manned aircraft was at its height. The airframe – derived no doubt in some wise from a Lippisch design –…
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Dornier Do 27 – Part Three – Why Go To All That Trouble?
Why go to all the trouble of detailing the inside of a 1/72 scale model aircraft? a. When you are going to have the windows closed? And possibly obscured by the sort of crazing and hazing that desert storage conditions bring about? See Davis-Monthan or Hatzerim photos for this reference. b. When the parts are…
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Dornier Do 27 – Part Two – Open For Business
And if the business the Dornier Do 27 is engaged in is aerial observation…it is superbly designed. From the pilot’s seats you can see every blessed thing down and forwards while from the passenger’s benches you also have a completely open set of side hatches. This would be a good plane to leap out of…
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What Do You Call That?
I call it finished, friend. It’s a scale model kit that I bought with my birthday money. I got all the paints I needed for it, read the instructions, and planned the paint scheme. I consulted the internet to see if it was reasonably accurate, but in the end I more or less made it…
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Mureaux 117 – Part Two – The Green Frog
Not FROG – this one is the Heller kit of 1967. The kit has fallen together beautifully. I lost a part, made a replacement, and steamed right on. The struts I worried about went in with absolute precision, and there was no filler needed anywhere. I feel myself fully rewarded for the price and will…
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Airspeed Oxford – Part Two – Pink Dot Special
You’ll note the pink dots on the wings and fuselage of the Airspeed Oxford – these are the lesions of Moulder’s Pox. It was a disease that afflicted scale models in the 1950’s and 60’s. It was caused by styrene mixtures that tended to shrink. This was exacerbated by pulling the sprue tree from the…
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Airspeed Oxford – Part One – The Leaky Frog
A recent estate sale brought this creature into my life; Lermontov the leaky frog. He is so named because he is from Russia, is made up of old parts, and is leaking sand all over the photo table. He is an apt analogy for the Novo Airspeed Oxford model. Lermontov cost nothing – the Airspeed…
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The PE Pests
No, I’m not talking about the people down the club who can make perfect PE parts every time and cement them on with no problems. I admire them. I’m talking about the Bohemian types who dream up the extra-thin parts on the PE sheets and expect you to be able to manipulate them into components.…
The Little World 