Category: frugality
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Another Bronco – Part One – This One Love You Slow Time

Readers can look at a previous post of the North American OV-10A kit I built and compare it to this one – that was just one page – this will hopefully be written on many more. The other plane was a fast build for a purpose – this one uses the same Academy kit but…
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Potez 540T – Part Three – It’s A Fish…

But not the sort that you choose to eat – Rick Stein would throw this one back. Dick Stein is not so fussy. The addition of the nose fairing is marginally better than the glass turret, but it has given a deep-sea blobfish look to the poor old Potez – in grey primer it is…
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Potez 540T – Part One – From The Back Of The Cabinet…

Another forgotten orphan comes in from the storm – a Smêr kit of the dear old Potez 540 from 1986 – a rebox of a 1967 Heller kit. I welcome it as a companion of my youth. Well, not exactly my youth – but someone’s. This kit was started but never got past the fuselage…
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Grey – Gray – Grau

This is not a black and white post… I was gifted a number of paint bottles – a LARGE number – and had to decide what to do with them. The first step was to ascertain whether they could be used with my normal airbrush and thinners – and apparently they could, with good success.…
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RAF Wellington – Part One – Another Legacy Bomber

This kit is the second legacy purchase from a deceased estate. The club member who passed away had not started it. A short google search turned up a number of RAF squadrons who flew this type and several clear illustrations showing camouflage pattern and squadron markings. As I had built a Wellington Mk 1c before…
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Middle-Class Modelling

Worrying about not being seen as better – or being seen as worse – than you really are? Perhaps it would be more accurate to refer to it as having a case of muddle-class modelling. However one defines it, by the time someone finds themself thinking they are in the middle of it, it is…
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Shoot Low, Boys.

They’re riding shetlands. The magazines that are published monthly, and bought yearly, all seem to praise extraordinary efforts put into scale kit building. It often involves extraordinary expense as well as inordinate time. The model engineer hobby is the prime example of this; years spent making a workshop – to spend more years making specialized…
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Aichi Seiran – Part One – A Bargain

And a Tamiya bargain at that – you don’t see many of those around the shops these days! I cannot say whether this Aichi Seiran float plane model was inexpensive because it was unpopular, or unpopular because it was an old kit, or an old kit because it was inexpensive…that sort of circular logic is…
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Lima Beans And Spinach

Some people like lima beans. Some like spinach. Some cannot stand either vegetable*. If they are in a restaurant it’s easy – they don’t order either. If they are eating at the family table or someone else’s house the problem becomes more difficult. They may have a heaping helping steaming there on the plate and…
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Westland Whirlwind – Part Three – The Admiral’s Barge

Part of my research material about this green -and-white helicopter suggests that it wore these colour so that it could function as an ornate flying Admiral’s barge for part of the Royal Navy. Other sources assign it a training role at a Naval Air Station. Whichever is correct – and they both may be –…
