Category: Miniature Philosophy
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When Someone Builds A Better Mouse Trap
The world is supposed to beat a path to their door. Which may not be a good thing…if they have just put in expensive turf and roped it off while the sprinklers are on. Plus the place may be knee-deep in dead mice and stink to high heaven. We had one that died in an…
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How Accurate Were They Back In The Day?
Depends on who they were and when the day was… I well remember seeing an Aurora Famous Fighter kit sold in Canadian hobby shops that purported to be a Soviet plane – variously touted as a Yak 25 or a MiG 19, that was nothing like either aircraft. It may have been drawn up and…
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Are Scale Modellers Just Overgrown Children?
We may be, depending upon who you ask. The secret to happiness is not to ask. Adult scale modellers of any ilk…car people, boat people, plane people, people people…can often find that other adults treat them with a snide disdain. Words and attitudes are discovered that suggest childishness in the modeller, and reduce them socially…
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The Barnacle
AKA the shelf queen. The styrene albatross. The kit that has sat on the hobby shop shelf ever since the place opened. The Unsold Undead… It may be worse than this. There are items in stock in many retailers that have been delivered from other shops that have previously failed; I saw it several times…
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Belt And Braces
And a bolt and a rivet and MIG welding and a big bracket. I like my models to stay together. The increasingly scale appearance of some models demands increasingly fine attachment points for some parts. The shafts, brackets, and pivots that might once have been fitting into thick plastic sockets and pins are now just…
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Bright Or Blight?
Are the colourful liveries spoiling us? If you are a scale hot rod or custom car builder, just quit reading now. This column has nothing to tell you. If you are an armour person, you can also go make a dark brown cup of coffee with flakes of rust in it. If you are an…
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Highly Desirable
And highly detailed. And highly priced. And highly unavailable. Hi-lee-hi-low. Hi-lup-a-pup. And that’s another magazine down the drain. I used to buy modelling magazines when I was a kid. For cars to begin with and later for scale models or military models. Model boats kept me going for years. I would read the how-to-do it…
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The Model Competition
I just read a meme-text put up on Facebook by an artist that has really resounded with me. Most social media philosophy is so much eyewash, but this one actually made sense. The gist of his post was that art is not a competitive event. There are no contests that should be won or lost.…
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A Thousand Pictures Are Worth A Word
And that word is generally : ” inaccurate “… In a world awash in internet images, the scale modeller could be forgiven for thinking that they’ll never have a problem with colour again. All they’ll have to do is google up an image of the prototype they’re building and copy the picture. This is as…
