Category: Hobby Shops
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Do Or Die-orama?
Is your little world being made around your ideas, or are your ideas being made around those of the retail trade? For some modellers – the model engineers in particular and to some extent the R/C model boaters – they are in control of their desires. Both groups make what they like…and spend a very…
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Do You Trust Your Dealer?
No, I’m not referring to the one with the ziplock bags of powder… I mean the one with the cardboard boxes of styrene kits. You should get some help… Your hobby dealer is your friend, if you will be his. You both have a vested interest in seeing the other happy and successful. All it…
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Moral Modelling
If you would raise your scale model building to a higher plane, there are things you can do on a practical basis. a. Moderate your language while building. Resin cockpits, photo-etch brass, and plastic tank tracks are no excuse for unmannerly conduct. If the plastic is starting to melt and the box catches fire, you…
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Modelling True To Yourself
Relax – there will be no hippie touchy-feely stuff. I’ve written before about trying out different types of modelling to see what you most enjoy. A car, a ship, an airplane, a rocket, and a tank give you a broad look at what is out there. Okay, there are trucks and figures and trains as…
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The Expensive Shop
We all know a hobby shop that is expensive to go to – because we spent more than we should have last time we visited. But was it really that bad? Or were we the authors of our own discomfort? Did we go in for a new bottle of black paint and come out with…
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Will We See The Z again?
Or will it remain on the nose, politically speaking? Eventually the Russo-Ukrainian war will end. I cannot say how or who will gain from it, and this is not the column space to debate politics. However, I did note that Zvezda and other Russian kits were disappearing from the Australian market back a few years…
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The Fifty Cent Fighter Plane
Sixty years on. My allowance in the eighth grade was 50 Canadian cents per week. It was more than adequate for my needs as I was stuck in an Alberta bush construction camp with no shops anywhere. Our one shopping trip a month went to Drayton Valley and by then I’d built up $2.00 pressure…
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The Best Kits Are The Surprise Ones
Either the ones that are given to you on birthdays and holidays or the acquisitions from abandoned stashes. The fact that they are an uncontrolled occurrence doesn’t lessen their value; it actually enhances it. There is a sense of surprise that you don’t get wandering the shelves of your usual hobby shop. Come to that,…
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The Search For New Plastic
Are you at an impasse? Have you built yourself out of a hobby? Are you standing in the hobby shop but not feeling the buzz? Relax – it happens to all of us one time or another. The people who have a lot of spare hobby money to burn have it happen a lot more…
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The Dwindling Stash
I am astonished to be writing this – my stash of 1:72 scale model kits is practically gone. I’m down to three and one gets done in a fortnight. Unless the wholesalers deliver some of the 2026 releases I will be forced to turn my attentions to another genre. Fortunately I have good projects in…
The Little World 