Category: Lacquer
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Mitsubishi Babs – Part Two – Just When You Thought…

Just when you thought modelling could not become uglier…I had a good idea. The camouflage patterns for many aircraft are wavy, blobby things. You can spray them freehand or mask them, but in most cases of 1:72 planes, masking is better. I’ve tried many different ways of doing it, but settled upon the putty worms…
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FROG Stash Avenger – Part Four – Show Bird

Casting about for a role for the FROG Avenger, I came upon a series of photos taken at a recent Dutch air show. They show a Grumman Avenger painted in what I assume are authentic colours for the Aéronavale – the air arm of the French Navy. I expect the aircraft would have been a…
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Is There Life After Enamel?

Now that everyone uses acrylics? Yes. We may have lost Testors but there is still Humbrol. You may have cut your teeth on them, grown to hate them, but now are curious about them. Find a test-bed model…something you can afford to ruin. Sand it, prime it, and grab a dear old a Humbrol pot.…
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SAAB J22 – Part Two – Dry Swede

Or, the first series build for the Little Workshop. I have just completed three big builds for the collection. They were spread over three work areas and many weeks. There were problems that held matters up and were then solved. I learned a couple of new facts. And noted an unsettling thing with the workflow;…
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English Electric Lightning – Part Three – Cross My Palm With SIlver

Very few aircraft are made of silver* – yet that is what the kit maker would have us paint them. And there is no one silver – as there might have been in the dear dead days of Humbrol tinlets. Now we have lacquers, clads, super metallics, etc. Some experts swear by certain brands and…
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Sprue Spray?

It was decades before I figured it out. In fact, Airfix and Revell knew it long before me. But it finally took Phil Flory to wise me up. The 5 ” P’s “: Paint Piddly Parts on the Plastic Prior to Parting them. Oh Gosh – I counted wrong. That’s 6 ” P’s “. Of…
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McDonnell Douglas F-15 – Part Two – Where Are The Spooks?

I thought McDonnell always named their fighters after some form of apparition, ghost, or ghoul – did Douglas make them pull their head in? Well, whatever – the 1/144 Academy kit has turned out well. And I have been sharply rapped on the nose for indulging in presumption… The basic assembly of these little kits…
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You Can Be Damned

So can I, and all we need to do is pick up the wrong pot of paint. The colour question has divided people for centuries… and no more so than in the hobby shop. The number of paints available to camouflage toy airplanes is exceeded only by the number of people who claim to know…
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Nieuport 24Bis – Part Two – French Silver-Grey

The colour that never stops giving. Or changing, for that matter. The FS-G pot is a standard GSI Creos bottle that possibly started life as a silver. But at some stage of the game a colour call-out asked for a duller shade and some black or grey was dropped into it. Then it got too…

