Category: Military models
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Canadian Valentine Tank – Part Four – Borden Baby

Or ” The Jolly Green Midget “. Say what you will about the green paint on this Valentine, it is the closest I can get to the distinctive colour on this tank and an adjacent Matilda as they sit in the CFB Borden museum right now. The colour illustrations that show these are taken in…
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Canadian Valentine Tank – Part Three – World of Wheels

I get on quite well with wheels in my model aircraft building – because I normally only have to paint three of them for each plane. Open a tank kit and start counting the round objects. No matter who made it – Germans, Russians, or British, they all decided that more wheels were better and…
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Canadian Valentine Tank – Part One – Well You Had Me At…

At Canadian, actually. Anything with a maple syrup glaze. This was not a model I saw in a local shop – it was ordered from the eastern states after a dangerous internet browsing session. It came with another Canadian armoured vehicle, but unfortunately I had not looked closely at the web page – that one…
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Canadian Valentine Tank – Part Two – Semi-Detailed

I am alternately delighted and dismayed when I see the interior of a model kit. It may be anything from fully-detailed to absolutely bare, and even the walls of the cockpit or interior of the tank or car may be problematical. There are moulds that concentrate their ijector pin towers right where you are looking.…
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Ponder Shelf – Part Two – The Iron Boxes

1/35 scale vehicles and accessories – a new standard. You can hardly fail to notice the 1/35 scale vehicle and military market. Tamiya started it, continues it, and shares it with any number of other makers. There are aisles of tanks, trucks, troops and trash cans in every hobby shop and the kits in the…
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Soviet AS Truck – Part Two – The Light Dawns

The ” Aha! ” moment in this build came as I tried to figure out what the platforms and driveshafts were all about and I ran across the term ” Huck starter “. A google hour then filled me in. And filled in a question I had about a number of airplane designs. On a…
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Soviet AS Truck – Part One – Diorama Time

I am so ignorant. I know nothing. I know less than John Banner as Sgt. Schultz. But I get to find out a lot of things. In this case the impetus proved to be the Library diorama business. I wanted to do the Soviet airfield at Uszhitmi and needed a vehicle for it. I thought…
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Renault R-35 – Part Six – Hit Me With That Rhythm Stick

Or a German tank shell – because that seems to be what the French armoured corps were hoping for when they thought up their paint scheme and then added tricolour insignia at all the best aiming points. I realise that they did not know what they were up against, nor what to do about it,…
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Renault R-35 – Part Five – Pierrot

I have discarded the idea of Art Deco – this tank has been painted by the costume designer for the Commedia Dell’Arte. I expect that there is an ammunition carrier that looks like Pierrette… The business of brush painting a model is both thrillingly new and old. It was my only means of model decoration…
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Renault R-35 – Part Four – Art Deco Armour

I cannot see the French armour colours in any other light than that of the 1920’s Art Deco movement. They are straight out of a pattern book of the period. Whether they disguised the tanks is another thing, but I’m guessing not. I have done a small bit of dirt-spray weathering on the hull at…
