Category: Hobby Shops
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Getting Out Of Your Comfort Zone
For the most part…don’t. Spend a good deal of your modelling time trying to locate it and when you find an entry point, crawl right in and close the hatch after yourself. Your ancestors lived largely outside comfort zones, as it happened, and spent a lot of time trying to locate them. They worked and…
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Let Us Now Praise Famous Buildings
Particularly if they are made by obscure companies. I needed a building for a desert museum layout. I have many small structures but they all look vaguely North American or British. It was with dubious enthusiasm I rolled into my local hobby shop. As I suspected – the Superquick and Meltcalf offerings were mostly railway…
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The Year-Round Scale Model Show – Part One
Here in Perth, Western Australia, we have been told that the big local scale model exhibition that’s been going for decades will fold up after this year. This is sad. The reasons given for this is the retirement of the organising committee and the lack of any volunteers to replace them. There may also be…
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The Scale Model Show – Part Two
What do you show of yourself when you make a tabletop display for the big local scale model exhibition? I don’t mean what model do you show – that’ll either be something you’ve slaved on for the last year or something you made aeons ago. I mean what are you selling when you are not…
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The Dead Ghost Of Habit
How many of the daily routines that fence your life are done out of necessity? How many out of enthusiasm? And how many are pure habit? All the way from eating and sleeping through cleanliness and exercise, we can have good habits or bad ones. In many cases we cannot tell the one from the…
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Simplistic Modelling For Complex People
Have you ever wanted to have a perfectly-detailled scale model of a walnut? Or a woodpecker? I cannot vouch for the first but I remember that there were plastic kits of birds that my friend Trevor built in the late 50’s. The kits came with matt paints and brushes and he was reasonably good at…
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Caproni C-311 – Part One – Tropical Splendour
Not that this aircraft is tropical in any way – it’s just that the kit has come from Singapore. A gift from a friend who took a holiday there. I always welcome Italeri Italian aircraft, because I know they do them well; it’s a matter of national pride. The parts fit, the moulding is free…
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AI And The Scale Modeller – Part Three – The Supervisor
If AI can think for itself, can it think for you? If you are unaccustomed to the task, there may be an opening… You generally decide to buy a kit by walking down the aisle of Hobbyhell and letting your imagination loose. As there are other enthusiasts in there with you it starts to take…
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Lemme See That Invoice
Suppose you were a person who imports scale model kits from Ruritania to sell in Australia. Suppose you have been selling them for years at Price A. Then suppose that a great national tragedy strikes Ruritania – war with neighbouring Latveria. Factories are deserted and stocks of Ruritanian scale model kits are threatened. Fortunately you…
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Who Decided My Childhood?
No, I don’t mean my parents or the school teachers or the rock and roll industry – I mean who decided which prototypes to make into the plastic models that I built? Bear in mind it was a childhood in a part of North America that was under both American and British influence. Airfix, FROG,…
The Little World 