Category: Modelling Supplies
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I’ve Got It All Taped Out…
Betcha don’t know where that expression comes from…Not from the electronics industry and not from the car body workshop. From the trenches of WW1. The British regularly laid cloth tapes from their lines toward the Germans to allow their troops to advance in the right direction without over-running other units on either side if they…
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Lockheed Lodestar – Part Five – My Father’s Son
I’ll say this now, at the risk of a haunting tonight – my father had some strange ideas. Not strange as in socially strange or religiously strange – his were more mechanically strange. They were generally a result of a problem that had to be solved, no fancy equipment at hand, and the availability of…
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Doing A Little Jig
And ‘tis not even St. Patrick’s Day, begorrah. I’ve been watching the YouTube modellers painting their planes and cars and musing about the business of the production jig. You’ve read about this before here in the Little World as I glue together bits of foamcore board to support aircraft during the painting process. I think…
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Yakovlev-3 – Part Three – The Dreaded Instrument
I used The Dreaded Instrument on helpless victims for 40 years. Oblivious to the screams and the smell of burning flesh, I pressed onwards in a mad orgy of torture. The only thing that would stop me was the end of the day or running out of electricity. In short, I was a dentist. And…
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Yakovlev-3 – Part One – Never Slow Down Past The Kit Aisle
I was just going to Hobbytech for a pot of paint…I told myself…I noticed that my lacquer bright silver was running very low and I wanted to stock up. The paint aisle was easy – I found the Mr Color Bright Silver and grabbed it. They make a number of other forms of silver paint…
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Squeeze Me, Baby…
I am constantly amazed at the sort of things that I can do with 8 fingers and 2 thumbs. I mean past the business of slashing car tyres and robbing poor boxes – I mean in the Little Workshop when the time comes to glue something. Because nothing ever cements to anything else without being…
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The Advantage Of Close Focus
Close focus is a subject that I take particular interest in with my photography columns – since I make scale models, I like to take pictures of them. I have special lenses for this, and lots of sneaky photographer’s tricks to make things look bigger than they really are. But it also applies even before…
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If You Know You Cannot Do It, Don’t Do It.
No sense jumping off the roof with cardboard wings. But if you don’t know you can’t do it…go ahead and try. I use this principle all the time in scale model building. I have built kits that were unbuildable, finished buildings that were improbable, and built dioramas with no knowledge whatsoever of what I was…
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Well Sir,…
The business of looking for scale models to build in a particular size is one thing. Finding aircraft to suit a particular air force is another. And getting a particular period of time… I always look for 1:72 RCAF WW2 through to 1966. To the great credit of the model kit companies, I can sometimes…
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The Eternal Question…
To spray or brush. Whether ’tis nobler to dilute the paint and shoot it onto the tiny row of parts in a minute and then spend 5 minutes and 10ml of cleaner getting the airbrush clean again, or spend ten minutes brush painting the little suckers…and the next week trying to ignore the brush marks.…
The Little World 