Category: Modelling materials
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Foam Core For The Win Yet Again
Using foam board is now becoming the new trend around here. We’ve stopped using sheets of pasta when we make lasagne – it’s foam board instead. It also makes pretty good non-lethal ninja stars, if you’re into sex games… It also solved a problem in the decaling of a new fighter plane. I built an…
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Shoot Low, Boys.
They’re riding shetlands. The magazines that are published monthly, and bought yearly, all seem to praise extraordinary efforts put into scale kit building. It often involves extraordinary expense as well as inordinate time. The model engineer hobby is the prime example of this; years spent making a workshop – to spend more years making specialized…
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The Irony Of It All
The use of bright yellow and bright green to attract the eye is a pretty standard practice in construction and road building – vehicles, structures, and people are all decked out accordingly to make sure someone sees them in the confusion of a building site. And the colours are all so bright and solid. Yet…
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Lima Beans And Spinach
Some people like lima beans. Some like spinach. Some cannot stand either vegetable*. If they are in a restaurant it’s easy – they don’t order either. If they are eating at the family table or someone else’s house the problem becomes more difficult. They may have a heaping helping steaming there on the plate and…
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A7 Corsair II – Part Three – A Grey Eminence
I am always a little daunted when I see a paint call-out that calls for different shades of grey…I am never certain whether they should be gray. The only thing about which I can be certain is that I will pick the wrong one. No, I’m wrong – the second thing I am certain of…
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It’s Only A Stash Sale…
If you buy something you will never build and sell something you really need to keep. There is no middle ground. You’ve been coveting one particular kit for decades and loathing another for even longer. The stash sale o’ doom is where these two emotions are both in play. You will pay an inordinate price…
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Desperate Modellers
Every time you encounter a model of the Eiffel Tower made of matchsticks, doff your hat and stand silent for a minute. You are in the presence of death. The person who spent six months making the model – and paid $ 50.25 for glue and wooden sticks – was a fine human being. Perhaps…
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Decals of Death
We’ve all bought an old kit from a garage sale or a swap meet. It may have started out in perfect shape, but then so did Hannibal before he crossed the Alps. Some of the kits I’ve bought still have elephant poop in the crushed old boxes… And they have sad sheets of decals. Sheets…
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Science To The Rescue – Part Two
How many ships have foundered in the Succitan Sea? There is no better way to find out if an old bomb is a dud than hitting the fuse with a hammer. Or, in the case of home-made decals, soaking them and trying them out. The 7 candidates were soaked, applied over Mr. Mark Setter, and…
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The Things I Never Knew…
Are probably only half the things that I don’t know yet. This has never been the case so much as in scale modelling, and particularly in the adhesives. Until I started adult modelling I had no idea of the possibilities for success or failure of PVA glue when I tried to use it on a…
The Little World 