Category: Model Airplane
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Grumman Hawkeye – Part One – Never Before Considered

Some model kits can be like that – you go along in your regular rut and never even give them a thought. Then a stash sale or clean-out of the back store-room of a hobby shop brings something to light. And you wonder why you had never wanted one. However, you want one NOW! This…
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Martin Canberra – Part Three – Da Nang 1966

With three good choices for a scheme, it was only the toss of a coin that painted this bomber high speed silver. The paint itself is the good old French silver grey melange now topped up with more fresh silver for a shinier finish. One of the extant B-57 aircraft at a museum in the…
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Martin Canberra – Part One – Old Italeri

I am always on the alert for Italeri kits – I find them an ideal blend of simplicity and precise moulding. This Italeri No 144 box was no exception – it was half-way down a pile of unwanted kits at a recent stash sale for the very reasonable price of $ 20. I balanced my…
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Čmelák – Part Four – Flying Fertiliser

I was fascinated with the instruction sheet for this Czech model as it detailed the service life of the Z-37A agricultural aircraft. It would appear that they are used for crop dusting and spraying in equal measure in middle Europe and are in some areas of the west as well. The planes are working for…
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Čmelák – Part Three – Jaundice

Or – dicing with yellow… Doing a good yellow is harder than you’d think. and it gets harder as you try to preserve more detail on a model surface. When you look down into the pot containing a yellow paint it all looks so easy – the colour is whatever the maker has specified, with…
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Čmelák – Part Two – Nothing Agricultural

Nothing crude about Eduard scale model kits. At least if this little crop duster is anything to go by. The mouldings on the sprue trees are superb. In fact I would rate them as highly as some people rate Tamiya offerings in the same scale. For a person who built some of the very early…
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Čmelák – Part One – Oh, I Don’t Know

” I’ve never built an Eduard kit – I might as well… And here are two versions – the Profipack and the Weekend. Three dollars difference in them…but I suspect that the dearer one would have photo-etch that I hate. Why not save a few bucks? Looks like I get four choices of Czech markings…
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Bristol Belvedere – Part Three – The Mehcopter

Cue enthusiasm…reboot…reboot. I think this is the first of the Airfix Vintage Classics that has disappointed. It is undoubtedly what it was in the original release, but like the original Blackburn Buccaneer, the Hovercraft, the Fairey Rotodyne, and the prototype Harrier, it strangely fails to please. Perhaps Airfix were precipitate in issuing something that was…
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Bristol Belvedere – Part Two – How Right They Were

This kit has all the appeal of a Revell re-box. The two halves of the fuselage may have been pulled out of the mould while still hot and allowed to cool on a window sill. The result is a progressive rolling distortion that will never allow the parts to join in one cementation I decided…
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Bristol Belvedere – Part One – Dire Warnings

And why I never heed them… This kit appeared in my local hobby shop before I read a review of it. It was reasonably priced, a Vintage Classic, and a type I had never built before. I forked over the cash and took it home. The review was not mealy-mouthed; it said this was the…
