Category: Miniature Philosophy
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No Business Like Show Business
Somewhere this afternoon a modeller is putting yet another coat of paint on their show model for the 2019 exhibition. In three days they will buff this off with the skin of an unborn albino ocelot and start to spray the next coat. Then the whole process will be repeated – it is going to…
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Every Dinner Is A New Dinner – Every Model Is A New Model
Every dinner does you good – if you eat it in pleasant company. Keep this analogy in mind when you sit down and think of doing some scale modelling. Every dinner needs preparation – oh, you might go to some restaurant and have it placed in front of you, but you will pay heavily for…
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Lockheed Lodestar – Part Three – But Wait, There’s More…
I am starting to get smarter when I open the box of a new kit – I dive for the instruction sheet. The thing I want to see straight away is the diagram of the sprues with the ID numbers on the bits that I will use and the greyed-out portions that indicate things that…
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Shall I Break It Now Or Wait Until Later?
The people in the plastic kit companies who write out the instructions and draw the diagrams are to be admired. I would accord them all honour as I tied them to the stake and bid the firing squad take aim. Because they are very talented and artistic criminals. Their chief crime, past the price they…
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Squeeze Me, Baby…
I am constantly amazed at the sort of things that I can do with 8 fingers and 2 thumbs. I mean past the business of slashing car tyres and robbing poor boxes – I mean in the Little Workshop when the time comes to glue something. Because nothing ever cements to anything else without being…
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If You Know You Cannot Do It, Don’t Do It.
No sense jumping off the roof with cardboard wings. But if you don’t know you can’t do it…go ahead and try. I use this principle all the time in scale model building. I have built kits that were unbuildable, finished buildings that were improbable, and built dioramas with no knowledge whatsoever of what I was…
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Can We Be Too Fussy?
Yes, we can! We’re scale modellers and fussy is what we do. If you want lackadaisical go down the hall to the Morris Dancing Club – they drink and they don’t care. Scale modellers, and their disreputable cousins, the Lego builders, do fuss a lot about little details. We want the model we build to…
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A New Superhero For The DC Or Marvel Universe
I don’t know which comic book empire is which, but I can recognise super-talent when I see it. I’m even more delighted to be able to report that it has surfaced in one of my favourite people – me. Captain Frugal. Nicknamed Cheap John. One afternoon I decided to get down to it and build…
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The Ten Dollar Model
This time we step up the pace a little with double the amount of money in our hand. Ten bucks is a big piece of change – if you add another dollar you can buy a pint of beer in a trendy hotel. So do not disrespect the tenner. It can also buy you a…
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The Five Dollar Model
Earlier in this column’s history I introduced the Glorious $ 5 Plan – the construction of an ICM Polikarpov Chaika in 1:72 scale that only cost me $ 5 to do. It was a one-off opportunity provided by a discard box sale at the annual WASMEX show…and you can be certain that I’m going to hover…
The Little World 