Category: Miniature Philosophy
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It Must Have A Little Challenge

It cannot be entirely Shake ‘n Bake. Easy-build kits are a blessing. I welcome the opportunity to whack together a classic air-frame in a day. It gives me a chance at the airbrush and decal printer next morning ( I love the smell of lacquer thinner in the morning. It smells like victory….). I can…
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Is Your Scale Being Scaled Back?

Is it getting tougher to find a new kit in your preferred scale on the hobby shop shelves? Here are some reasons why: a. The various wars around the world are interfering with trade enough to keep the plastic warships and planes away from us. b. The hobby shops are running lean in their buying.…
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Do What You Can

With what you have – where you are. This may have been Teddy Roosevelt’s line or it might have been from an earlier writer. Since I just typed it, it’s mine now. You are free to use it as you will. You have a kit in front of you – for which you may have…
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Disloyalty Is Not Allowed

Modellers are required to decide which nation in the Little World they will belong to and will not be allowed to emigrate to another. If you build plastic aircraft you will not be allowed to make wooden ships or doll houses. If you run trains you are not allowed to look up in the sky.…
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Less Can Indeed Be More

Well…more or less… This famous fashion dictum also applies to a lot of scale modelling. Those of us who model in smaller scales are often unable to apply the same structures or details that other people can achieve. We have to paint suggestions rather than cement on actual structures. We also spend less on individual…
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All My Best Models Cost Under $ 10

Because they are the poor, sad runts of the hobby shop litter – or the nearly-dead ones that just pass from stash to stash without ever getting built. I give them hope and dignity. I clip their parts off the distorted sprue trees without making noises of obvious disgust. I sand off flash and rivets.…
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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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Should You Be Able To Write Critiques Of Other People’s Models?

I mean it happens all the time in the theatre and art galleries. Books are published and the critics review them in the newspaper. The Sunday Morning Umpires are always replaying someone else’s game… And we all read forums and groups and posts on social media that degenerate into flame wars. Why not the scale…


