Category: frugality
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Boeing B-17G – Part One – Academy
Or is that Minicraft? The box for this old B-17 lists both companies and a recent announcement from Academy in South Korea says that the assets of this older American company have been acquired by them. This box looks to be slightly old and slightly squashed and the instructions date the Academy sheet at 1992.…
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Modelling Without Guilt
It’s rather like sex without guilt – fun, but a little bland. Not that you want to be pursued through bedroom doors and corridors like a Feydeau farce, but a little innocent concealment of the new kit makes for a frisson of excitement – even if it turns out to be the same old moulding…
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What To Do When You Can’t Get It
Relax, lady. This is about scale modelling – not sex. What do we do when the scale model magazine shows a wonderful new range of after-market parts to detail a kit and everyone else in the world can get it except us? Stuck on the edge of the Indian Ocean way out past where the…
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Tasman Airspeed Oxford Mk I – Part Five – Wild Blue Yonder
And off we flaming go… Someone at Tasman was enamoured of the vacuum moulding machine – the one they used for clear canopies – and of the possibilities that it presented. So they made a decision to try something that is – so far – unique in my model-building experience. They vac-formed the canopy a…
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Tasman Airspeed Oxford Mk I – Part One – Agricultural
New Zealand is a superb agricultural country. Their wool and meat, dairy and fruit, and all things related are absolutely first-class. Their 1:32 scale model kits – when produced in China to NZ designs, are also world-beaters. Their 1:72 kits moulded in Rollaston, near Christchurch are an experience. I have made one before – a…
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If You Must Trash Your Models
Sadly, scale models do not often last…they may be gone when their builder goes. Few people appreciate the hobby enough to keep all of a collection. Of course this doesn’t include historic models such as those found in Greenwich Maritime Museum or other institutions. But plastic models in a lounge room? Little chance. Before this…
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Angels
The second squadron of Plasticville fighters. My purchase of three Plasticville airport hangars some years ago added more aircraft to the pile. For a while I thought of them as US naval jets, but a Plasticville on-line forum identifies them as Douglas X-2 Skyrockets. I think this is right, but it didn’t stop me from…
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Do We Have A Trade War With Japan, China, Or The Czech Republic?
No? Goodoh. That means we really should be able to order kits and supplies from these countries free of any interference from the Petulant of the United States, Ronald Grump. I have been looking at the kits I build and the goods I want and am a little saddened to see that some of the…
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Lockheed S-3A Viking – Part One – Price?
So Why So Cheap? How come a perfectly good Hasegawa jet is about half the price you’d expect to pay? Perhaps I am looking a gift horse in the molars, but I do puzzle at some of the pricing in some of the shops. The Hasegawa S3A Lockheed Viking was under $40 in a rack…
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Never Throw Nuthin’ Away
You might very well love it some day. The formation flying team you see started life as four out-of-scale plastic toy fighters that were packaged with Plasticville airport buildings. Made in the mid-1950’s these structures populated thousands of O-guage and S-guage toy train layouts in North America. The lettering and insignia on the planesare in…
The Little World 