Category: design
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Bright Or Blight?
Are the colourful liveries spoiling us? If you are a scale hot rod or custom car builder, just quit reading now. This column has nothing to tell you. If you are an armour person, you can also go make a dark brown cup of coffee with flakes of rust in it. If you are an…
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Savoia Marchetti SM.81 – Part Four – Stop Laughing
This is serious. That’s an Australian joke, for the overseas readers. For the locals, its a historic Australian cartoon. Go look it up. The Bulletin long ago. In my case the risible arose because I needed to occlude the window spaces of the Pipistrello before painting. I’d deliberately left out the bulls-eye plastic windows that…
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Savoia-Marchetti SM.81 – Part Three – Airframe
We have an aircraft – not just parts in a box. The wing fit of the Italeri SM.81 was darned near perfect – a few scrapes of a modelling knife on the internal bearing surfaces of both wings and there was hardly a gap to be seen. It gave excellent purchase for a slightly thicker…
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Savoia-Marchetti SM.81 Pipistrello – Part One – The RRAAF’s New Poster Plane
Readers of this column who follow the history of the Royal Ruritanian Army Air Force will be long familiar with the history of the service. The training facilities in Alberta, the variegated equipment roster, the bad decisions and worse outcomes…all have been documented. But here is a new chapter of the saga – brought to…
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Handley Page Heyford – Part Three – All The Appeal..
Of a hairless cat… The period between the wars was a time of increased streamlined elegance in the design world. Cars, locomotives, buildings…they all got sleeker and more aerodynamic. How ironic that the HP Heyford – designed to fly through the air – should do so looking like a washing machine. I attached the upper…
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Handley Page Heyford – Part One – Come On March
I rarely urge the calendar to advance – I am at an age when I appreciate every day – indeed, being retired, I frequently mistake one for another. As long as I can remember scale model club morning and garbage night, the rest of the week can dissolve. But a special month was coming; Matchbox…
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Nieuport 17C – Part Two – Old But Good
This very old mould still can teach the new firms several lessons. The first one is that you need not engineer gaps into your parts. They can, indeed, be made to meet all along their surfaces. Unless your firm derives the bulk of its income from plastic putty and sandpaper sticks, providing close-fitting parts is…
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” I Want To Return This Kit “
And I want a full refund for it. a. It is the wrong kit. I wanted the right kit. Okay, I brought it from the shelf to the till myself and paid for it, but it was the wrong kit when I got it home and the wife found out how much it cost. b.…
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Are We Having Fun Yet?
When that question comes up, the answer is never ” Yes “. Yet it could be… I do things that are pointless and expensive and embarrassing. And fun. I’m not going to tell you what, but you can let your imaginations run wild. As this is a scale model column, wild is likely to involve…
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Dodged A Bullet?
Perhaps. And it was just a series of events… The Scale Modellers Club of Western Australia newsletter that has just started to appear in this column was initially going to be an email-based bulletin that would reach out to some 50 or so members and local shops. I gathered email addresses from the club members…
The Little World 