Category: Modelling materials
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” Paint Parts Before Assembly “

” What? Instructions? We laugh at your instructions! Real men glue everything together first and then mask for a week to paint something! We don’ need no estinkin’ instructions… An’ as far as dat go, we decal before we paint. We decal any time we damwell feel like! Nobody tell us when to decal. An’…
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The Proper Font Is Never There

I do my own decals in an inkjet printer for many of the 1:72 aircraft I build. It’s not that I am contemptuous of the commercial maker’s decals – far from it. I love Cartograf and other fine printing companies for they ability to make a good decal with thin carrier film and good moulding…
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Red Sky At Night – Airbrusher’s Delight

Or was that in the morning? It’s so hard to tell with these old folk sayings. The people who say them to you are old folk and they generally forget what they came in the room for anyway… I had no idea when I embarked upon a life of chromatic crime – also known as…
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Are You Cutting Edge?

Well keep away from your fingers, then… Being the most advanced modeller in your circle is a wonderful ambition, but then so is being a successful train robber. I believe Jesse James used to build nice 1:16 scale stagecoaches… In our club there are also nice stage coach builders, as well as boat, ship, and…
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PZL Gull Wing – Part Three – Those Decals

Okay, let’s talk dirty. I’ll start. Polish and Russian decals. Sorry to be so brutal, but the topic needs addressing. In the past I have wished to address the makers of some Polish, Ukrainian, and Russian plastic model kits and send them the sheets back with suitable curses. The problem has not so much been…
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PZL Gull Wing – Part Two – Polish Plastic

I would love to read a definitive article on the plastics that we encounter in our model kit building. I suppose a lot of it is trade secrets and economic choices, but I think there would be a lot of interest in a scientific analysis of the various styrenes In particular, please give us a…
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Use the Dull Blade…

Said no modeller, ever. Yet we all do it. We use the blade until the tip breaks off and the edge has tram lines on it and we need to push it 300 times harder to get it to cut. And when it is just right; dull, nicked, and rusty, we push it over the…
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Perverse Hopes

Relax. This is Safe For Work. If they have accepted the fact that you build plastic model kits, the worst is over. You can stop pretending to respectability and go back to looking at Airfix magazine in the toilets. The perverse hopes we speak of are: a. The hope that a major manufacturer will mould…
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Smorgasbuilding

One of those, and one of those, and one of those… And you won’t build that sort again, because they’re icky. And there you are, in the aisle of the local HobbyHell Supastore looking for a small bottle of paint – or a large box of tank. And you see a rack full of packets…
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Mirage F.1C – Part Two –

I am not a naturally suspicious person. I do not see conspiracies in every coup, assassination, or Disney movie. I regularly send money to Nigerian princesses. Yet I suspect every tricycle-geared airplane that they build…they are all tail-sitters just waiting for us to have a moment’s lapse of attention. I regularly weigh and balance planes…
