Category: design
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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…
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Not Every Tool Is A Good Tool
But they won’t tell you that at the hobby shop or on the internet site. We all have more tools than we use…every toolbox I’ve ever seen has at least 10 – 20% excess in it that just gets shifted about when we look for the useful items. Yes, I’m guilty of this too. Every…
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Who Sets The Bar Over Which You Leap?
Who sets you up to fail? Is it the manufacturer who makes a 600-part kit where 50 parts would be adequate? Is it the contest judge with a God-complex who marks you down to boost himself up? Is it you, who live in perfect magazine images and internet sites and never realise that real life…
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General Dynamics F111 – Part One – A New Maker
I am never happier than when building a kit from a maker that I have not encountered before. It is a new land to explore. This Arii kit from Japan came with very rudimentary instructions - really nothing to help with decal placement or colouring save the box art. Yet the individual components and the decals…
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Bristol Type 130 Bombay – Part Three – Is It Mistrust Or Distrust?
The dictionary isn’t clear on the distinction. Either way, when I look at the design of some kits – particularly the butt joint of a thin horizontal stabiliser – I start to get sceptical. My experience of adhesives tells me that there are all too many instances when they don’t. I would not ask long…
The Little World 