Category: Model Airplane
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Pigs To The Wrong Market
Will never make bacon. My tour down the airplane aisle of my local hobby shop showed very little new but I noticed that they have ordered and arranged the kits according to manufacturer again. And yet again the section of eastern European ex-soviet unaccountables is fully stocked. I do not think they’ve had a fresh…
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Polikarpov I-3 – Part Four – Lightning
Like my luck, it never seems to strike twice in the same place… Fortunately, this AGA kit has proved to be good luck and has come out far better than might have been expected upon opening the sad old box. The assembly of the wings was easier than many biplanes have been – I made…
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Polikarpov I-3 – Part Three – The Ability To Judge A Clue
I think the most important thing in building a scale model is to learn how to judge between a good thing and a bad one. This might be the case in a lot of other aspects of life as well – but here we need to know what we are dealing with, what we can…
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Polikarpov I-3 – Part Two – Simple Pimple
In a flurry of experimentation i decide to take a compact camera to my hobby club to document the start of the Polikarpov project. It was largely successful, as I was able to take pictures of a lot of other member’s workplaces as well. These will be used to blackmail them in the future. As…
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Polikarpov I-3 – Part One – Fillin’ In The Numbers
I did not realise how many Polikarpov aircraft I have in the collection until I reviewed it to see if this was new. It is – This will slot between the monoplane I-1 and the biplane I-15. A totally new ( but probably defunct ) Polish model making firm, too. In any case this stash…
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You Can Be Damned
So can I, and all we need to do is pick up the wrong pot of paint. The colour question has divided people for centuries… and no more so than in the hobby shop. The number of paints available to camouflage toy airplanes is exceeded only by the number of people who claim to know…
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Nieuport 24Bis – Part Three – The Clean Machine
I suspect I could not have used this title two minutes after the ground crew swung the propeller for this French fighter. The exhaust provisions for the rotary engine seem to be two oval holes cut into the lower portion of the engine cowling. Given the castor oil thrown out by the motor plus the…
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Nieuport 24Bis – Part Two – French Silver-Grey
The colour that never stops giving. Or changing, for that matter. The FS-G pot is a standard GSI Creos bottle that possibly started life as a silver. But at some stage of the game a colour call-out asked for a duller shade and some black or grey was dropped into it. Then it got too…
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Nieuport 24Bis – Part One – So What’s With The Bis, Eh?
What was wrong with the plain letter B? Not European enough to be sophisticated? Well, the dictionary defines it as meaning ” again ” so the Bis version is the second one. Like we couldn’t have gotten that from a simple ” B ” ? Son of a Bis… This is another Roden kit, and…
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The Underside
And differences in opinion. Nothing is more striking when looking at aircraft camouflage than the variety of colours and shades that the different air forces used under the Plimsoll line. A glance at any of the Profiles books, a visit to an air museum, or the call-out sheets from any kit maker show colours like…
The Little World 