Category: design
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If You Made Models Of Dead Cows

Someone, somewhere, would buy them. A disturbing set of questions would revolve about what scale to make and who to aim it at. I am guessing 1:24 or 1:35 and the car or armour markets respectively. The diorama that would be built using the models would reveal a lot about the modeller. It would not…
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Hobbyist Approved…

Oh dear God. I have just seen an advertisement for a portable airgun that is ” Hobbyist Approved “. The world is spinning before my eyes. Bells are ringing and strange phantoms drift in an out of my vision. Whether they are approved by hobbyists is unknown. Children, we are scale model hobbyists and we…
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Koolhoven Fk 58 – Part Two – Ease Of Construction

Whenever you make a scale model kit, someone is going to be lazy. It’ll either be the designer or you. In the case of the Azur Koolhoven Fk 58 the designer has done the hard millimetres so I can cruise along. The cockpit pan holding all the detail parts can be inserted after the fuselage…
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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,…
