Category: design
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Prior Exposure
If it all happened before, you can be sure that it will all happen again. Somewhere there is an iceberg looking for an ocean liner. And the next time you book a zeppelin… It is the same with scale modelling – you can bet on death, taxes, and Spitfire kits. If it caught a penny…
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Eventually The Kit Will Be Finished
Or the Earth will spiral into the sun. Either way, there will be an end to it. Some builds seem to take forever. You start out looking forward to a few weeks of building and eventually it becomes a few months. If the calendar stretches to an extra year, you know you have a special…
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The Underside
And differences in opinion. Nothing is more striking when looking at aircraft camouflage than the variety of colours and shades that the different air forces used under the Plimsoll line. A glance at any of the Profiles books, a visit to an air museum, or the call-out sheets from any kit maker show colours like…
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Making A Hobby Out Of A Job
It’s generally the other way round, isn’t it. People go along loving something they do for themselves and then someone suggests money should be made from it. The hobby becomes a side-hustle, and then a venture, and then a full-blown job. Eventually it palls and the former enthusiast comes to hate it. So they take…
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The Orphaned Kit
Shed a tear for the poor bedraggled box-scale kit that sits abandoned on the hobby shop shelf. It may have been there for months or years – left all alone in the world when its maker passed into the great bankruptcy in the sky. It is getting dented and dusty…shabbier with each passing day. And…
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The Itch Builder
And I write because I am just that when the need arises. These days I build mostly model aircraft in one scale. I like to photograph them in my studio and need structures and accessories to go with the kit-built planes. The trade is pretty lax about making things for model aircraft…very much so in…
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Canadian Valentine Tank – Part Four – Borden Baby
Or ” The Jolly Green Midget “. Say what you will about the green paint on this Valentine, it is the closest I can get to the distinctive colour on this tank and an adjacent Matilda as they sit in the CFB Borden museum right now. The colour illustrations that show these are taken in…
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How Long Ya Going To Be?
There’s people here who need to go… Well, it’s not about that, though the topic is really one that can rivet you to the seat, if you know what I mean. I mean how long should you take to build a model? Well, if you are a model engineer setting out to build a coal-fired…
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How Far Down The Yellow Brick Road?
How far into fantasy are you prepared to take your modelling? Why would you go there? Will it satisfy you or others? Good questions. From the dream doll house to the whiffery Heinkel to the improbable hot rod, we have all seen modellers exercising their imaginations as much as their hobby knives. Some of these…
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Handley Page Heracles – Part Two – Wings Over Wetaskwin
This kit build has nothing to do with Wetaskwin, but if you have been waiting for 60 years to use that line, you just go for it. The sprue trees that made up this kit looked like a picket fence – or a game of pick-up-sticks; there were that many struts. The box art was…
The Little World 