Category: German aircraft
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Junkers 52 – Part Four – The Interior Gem

Remember I once wrote that you should make a model of anything that you model? Well here is a prime example provided by Italeri in their moulding of the Junkers 52 – the interior fitments. As you can see a fair amount of the interior through the large rectangular passenger windows, I figured it would be…
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Junkers 52 – Part Three – The Sprues Goose

Okay, that was a bad aviation pun. I’m not ashamed of it, though, as the contents of the Italeri kit have braced me up immensely. This is the sort of modelling I like to do – just the level of detail that supports 1:72 scale without going too far either way. Of course there are…
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Junkers 52 – Part Two – Contemplating A Corrugated Road

You can’t get away from the fact that the Junkers people – like Henry Ford and the Citroen car designers – knew a thing or two about the way materials behave – in particular on how to make a sheet of metal stiffer than you’d expect. Simple. Bend it in repeated folds like a corrugated…
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Junkers 52 – Part One – The Call Of The Mild

Not all my model aircraft builds are warplanes – though the economics of the model industry mean that they make up the bulk of offerings on the shelves. And even if they are military aircraft, not all of them have to be fighters or bombers…as evinced by the Douglas Dakota with RCAF markings. So there…
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Messerschmitt 109 – Part Four – The Production Line

I cannot think of a worse way to approach the business of being a scale modeller than that of a production line worker with a contract to produce a product in a set time. This also applies to the full-size workers who made the full-size airplanes – Some were employed and some were drafted and…
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Messerschmitt 109 – Part Five – The Captive Bird

A surprising number of airplanes have been captured in war and returned to flying on behalf of their enemies. Some as service machines, some as decoys, and some as test beds. This might seem to be a bonus for the people who capture the enemy’s warplanes, but remember that they also need to capture the…
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Messerschmitt 109 – Part Three – Suspicions…

I am not a naturally suspicious man, as anyone who has seen me in the police lineups will attest. I am ready to take anyone at face value…as long as I can pronounce them guilty. This benign attitude even extends to looking at pictures of fighter planes and trying to figure out their colour schemes.…
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Messerschmitt 109 – Part Two – Modelers Sushi

If that seems like a funny way to think of a kit, consider that the Hobby Boss products are sometimes served on plastic trays within the external box – rather like the tasty Japanese food that we get from shopping centres. The kit is just as well presented – all that is missing is the…
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Messerschmitt 109 – Part One – Never Let A Chance Go By…

I am indebted to a friend, Paul, for that bit of philosophy. He’s another modeller/collector/builder type and makes regular visits to hobby shops and toy stores wherever he goes. And he has the modeller’s eye that sees viable scale building materials in completely unlikely products. In my case it was a visit to a store…
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The Cost Of The Kit

I was standing in an Aisle Of Doom and calculating. The Aisle is located in my local hobby shop and is named because once I go there I am doomed to buy something. The shop has several Aisles – some dedicated to trains, some to airplanes. One is given over to paints and chemicals. All are…
