Category: design
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Vought Crusader F-8 – Part Two – Cockpit Decals
Bless the designer who thought of making decals for the cockpits of 1/72 scale aircraft. I admire the resin parts that people buy for aftermarley – they can be superbly detailed. A worker in 1/48 and larger would certainly get good visual value from a resin seat or control stick. And the PE brass instrument…
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Vought Crusader F-8 – Part One – Iconic
As a young person, this was the naval jet aircraft I was most impressed by. It seemed to encompass all there was about flying. Yet I never possessed a model of one until now – and for years the Italeri kit had been offered on the shelves without getting a nod. I cannot explain the…
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Leonardo Da Vinci’s Cartoons
No, you fools, not the ninja turtles. The real Da Vinci and the preparatory drawings he used to do in chalk and charcoal before launching out onto canvas and oil paint. Think you can pick one up for a bargain price? I mean it’s just a chalk sketch, right? How much could chalk cost…? You…
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The Toy Makers
Some scale model builders look askance at people who deal with toys – whether these are wooden horses or cast-metal cars or life-like figurines. There is more than a hint of condescension when they are compared to the latest Tamigawafix 1:200 kit of the Prince Of Huddersfield. The one with the 1200 separate parts and…
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The No Step Two Step
Or how I stencilled myself into the asylum. As a kid facing my first decal sheets, I was blazingly confident. Allowed to use water and scissors…what could possibly go wrong? After all, Aurora moulded the position of the USAF and the insignia right there on the top of the wing – all you had to…
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The Arrogant Strut
Those who saw Mussolini were impressed with the way he strutted. Likewise with Al Jolson and Kaiser Wilhelm II. However, none of them were as arrogant as the Airfix company when it comes to strutting…as witnessed by their production of a 1:72 Bristol F.2B. They have produced a kit that is nearly impossible to assemble.…
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Trying To Get That Exclusive Prototype
And hoping that it is one that everyone secretly always wanted to build. This can be the only explanation for a number of short-run kits that flow out of Eastern Europe. There can be only a few individuals on the planet that dream of building failed designs that are both ugly and insignificant. Even driven…
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The Tsunami
It started as a fountain of knowledge – then a pool of information – then a flood of images. Now we have a tsunami and modellers are being drowned at their workbenches. I mean the internet, and specifically the Google images page. The go-to when you are looking for either inspiration or confirmation. You want…
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If You Don’t Want To Have A Good Time…
Tell us now – we’ve got kits that we’ve been saving for just such an occasion… As a kid, I saw kits in shops that I knew were a mistake. The shop might have been a hardware store in a Canadian bush town, a news agency in an Australian country town, or the leftovers in…
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To Paint Or Not To Paint
That is the question. Whether ’tis nobler to coat the photo etched brass parts of your kit with the same paint as the injected plastic ones and let them sink into oblivion or to leave them unpainted and declare your skill and investment to the world. For those of my clubmates who might feel I…
The Little World 