Category: Model Airplane
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Piasecki HUP Retriever – Part Four – The Model As Teaching Aid
As a kid interested in mechanical devices and particularly in aircraft and cars, there were a number of remarkably stupid ideas in my mind at the time. I would look at some fabulous machine and admire the external styling without the slightest notion of what might be going on inside. That’s pretty standard for a…
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Piasecki HUP Retriever – Part Three – The Temperature Gradient
Or ” How to build scale models without dying in the process “. The interior of the Little Workshop was over 42º Celsius one afternoon. No surprise – it was predicted to be a hot, still Sunday and the prediction was accurate. Also no surprise – this was Western Australia in the summertime. We saw…
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Piasecki Army Mule – Part Two – Army Mule = Navy Retriever.
The Piasecki H25 Army Mule helicopter was not a very big lifter – even for a twin-rotor aircraft. None of the helicopters of the 50’s period were – they were limited by what their aero engines could do. The H 25 has a twin-row radial engine buried in the fuselage, but it is a small…
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Piasecki Army Mule – Part One – Buy Me, Boss…
Trolling the aisles of Hobbytech recently I was feeling discouraged – they’d had a big Christmas and sold off a lot of goods – but there weren’t many small kits left that fit my criteria; cheap, simple, and a western prototype in the propeller or early jet eras. I wasn’t able to spend big on…
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Hobby Money – Part Three – Finding Your Equivalencies
There’s all sorts of equivalencies that steer us around our lives. How many hours should you work to pay someone for working those same hours doing something you cannot do? How many if it is something you will not do. If you have good fortune, is it subtracted from their lives, or vice versa? Deep…
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Bell Model 47 – Part Three – The Bubble
Well, that was a surprise. I opened the Italeri box one morning at the modelling club and the helicopter landed, finished, on my studio table at 4:30 PM next day. And there was time in between working on it to put the camouflage colours on the CH-147 Chinook. I’ve no idea what this indicates in…
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Bell Model 47 – Part Two – Nothing Looks Like An Airplane
Upon opening the Italeri Bell Model 47 box and sliding out the two sprues I was struck by the fact that nothing on them looked like it could end up being an airplane. A collection of random boxy shapes interspersed with spindly framework. Frighteningly delicate parts. And when you come to think of it, wasn’t…
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Bell Model 47 – Part One – Sheer Terror Over the Brazeau
Being a kid whose dad was the project manager for a big construction project had its advantages – you got to ride out with him after supper when he made the evening round of the construction site and you got to climb all over the big tractors and earthmovers. In some cases, if they had…
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Yellow Sky In The Morning…
Modellers take warning. Have you ever looked at the box art of the plastic kits and wondered at the meteorology of it all? I took some time last week to survey the skies displayed inside the kit aisle of Hobbytech and found that they were predominantly yellow. Well, three colours, actually; yellow, orange, and lurid.…
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Boeing Vertol CH 147 Chinook – Part Five – Whatever Happened To Sky??
Specifically, whatever happened to the colour Sky as applied to the underside of British and Commonwealth aircraft? The underside of this Canadian CH 147 Chinook seems distinctly visible, as the bronze-black and deep green camo scheme – as admirable as it seems on the top and sides of the helicopter – wrap around down under…
The Little World 