Category: Model Airplane
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Four Legs Good – Two Legs Bad

Forgive me the George Orwellianism – I have been wrestling with the devil and it has affected my mind. I’ll be right after cocktail hour. The task for last night – while the glue for the canopies of the Hampden was setting – was the reconditioning of a Nakajima Hayate. You can play with the…
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Lockheed P-38 – Part Six – The Dirty Bluebird

As I’ve written before, every new build is a chance to have a new experience. This one has been my baptism in how to change horses in mid-stream, how to concentrate the mind, and how to make a deliberately dirty mess. I hasten to add that I already know how to make an accidentally dirty…
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Lockheed P-38 – Part Five – The Wild Blue Yonder

What do you do when you discover that you are going the wrong way? If you are Douglas Corrigan you just keep on going and hope to hit Ireland eventually. If you are me, you stop and see if you can turn around. I stopped after I did some more research on the RAAF’s only…
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Lockheed P-38 – Part Four – The Drive Shaft

The Hobby Boss model of the Lockheed P-38 Lightning has something I have not seen before on any plastic model airplane – it has a driveshaft. Or put more accurately, it has two. All the other models I’ve encountered have had just the opposite – a precise hole in the crankcase or nose where a…
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Lockheed P-38 – Part Three – Every Plane You Build…

Every plane, train, car, and structure you build in scale makes your brain better. The act of turning over the parts, relating them to the instructions, fitting them together, and observing the relationships between the surfaces teaches you far more about the particular full-size object than any photograph or screen representation ever can. And if…
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Lockheed P-38 – Part One – Smile For the Camera

When you go past the new kit shelf at the hobby shop and notice that you can get a 1:72 fighter plane for $ 14.95…but if you add another $ 5.00 they’ll give you an extra engine and tail…well it would be foolish not to go with the bargain. Hence the new Hobby Boss Lockheed…
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When Your Time Has Come…

I was thinking of this question while visiting the local hobby shop – Hobbytech. A Sunday afternoon and just the time one runs out of khaki-coloured paint. No good sitting there and wishing that it would appear in the paint rack – you just have to go out and get it. The hobby shop was…
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Where Was That Blasted XF-68?

Yes, I paint model kits. Yes, I have more than one bottle of paint. Yes, I lose the occasional one down the back of the sofa… Now that I am building more model aircraft kits from different air forces I am getting more paints. Some are direct shades and some are mixtures. I have transcribed…
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Ye Olde Kitte

I went to the swap-meet section of the plastic modelling exhibition a little while ago and looked around. I do that – surreptitious spying is one of those hobbies that you can do with little initial outlay – Just a black cloak and broad – brimmed hat. The dark sunglasses and anarchist’s bomb are just…
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Republic P-47 – Part Four – Value For Money

It’s not cool to be cheap. Every commercial website or advertisement makes it clear to you that you only qualify for the admiration of the world if you spend money. The more you spend, the better you are regarded. This is a wonderful success on the part of the advertising culture – it used to…
