Category: Model Airplane
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Mureaux 117 – Part Two – The Green Frog
Not FROG – this one is the Heller kit of 1967. The kit has fallen together beautifully. I lost a part, made a replacement, and steamed right on. The struts I worried about went in with absolute precision, and there was no filler needed anywhere. I feel myself fully rewarded for the price and will…
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Mureaux 117 – Part One – The Bargain Heller
Again a good opportunity to build a by-gone kit has come my way – a legacy kit being cleared out at a very low price. Part of that may have been prompted by the appearance of the box – squashed and scuffed, and of a Heller era that seems crude to our eyes. It debuted…
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Disaster In The Cabinet Room
No politics – this is the story of a collapse in a scale model storage cabinet. In finitely more distressing than anything that happens in Canberra. A call at my studio discovered the bad news – a glass shelf in one of my IKEA cabinets had dropped on one end and crushed to scale models.…
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Painting With Perceived Wisdom
Or painting with rumour, advice, lies, advertisements, and blind faith. Pardon – that should be blind, stumbling faith. What could possibly go wrong? Painting white is tough. Painting red is tougher. Painting yellow worse. Painting silver worst of all. Woe is us, woe and wailing. And particularly if we listen to everyone else’s advice. And…
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Airspeed Oxford – Part Four – The Central Flying School
The third partner in the Training Trio. My BCATP airfield: RCAF WET DOG – has struggled on for years with an Anson, a Harvard, and a Crane – all good trainers. Of course there is a Tiger Moth and a Grumman Gosling as well, but up until now the Airspeed Oxford has eluded me. Now…
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Airspeed Oxford – Part Two – Pink Dot Special
You’ll note the pink dots on the wings and fuselage of the Airspeed Oxford – these are the lesions of Moulder’s Pox. It was a disease that afflicted scale models in the 1950’s and 60’s. It was caused by styrene mixtures that tended to shrink. This was exacerbated by pulling the sprue tree from the…
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Airspeed Oxford – Part One – The Leaky Frog
A recent estate sale brought this creature into my life; Lermontov the leaky frog. He is so named because he is from Russia, is made up of old parts, and is leaking sand all over the photo table. He is an apt analogy for the Novo Airspeed Oxford model. Lermontov cost nothing – the Airspeed…
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The PE Pests
No, I’m not talking about the people down the club who can make perfect PE parts every time and cement them on with no problems. I admire them. I’m talking about the Bohemian types who dream up the extra-thin parts on the PE sheets and expect you to be able to manipulate them into components.…
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SERIOUS Modelling
Here in Australia we have Yahoo Serious. He is not an internet server….but he has served us well over the years as a comedy actor. Serious laughter is a Serious matter… In the scale modelling hobby we can also encounter a spectrum of involvement that goes from the Terribly Serious to the Delightfully Comic. I…
The Little World 