Category: Painting
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Ilyushin Il-10 – Part Four – The Beast Built

Well, another Mr. Craft aircraft is built. While not as precise as the Fairey Fulmar, the Il-10 has come out well on the side of good. Whatever the makers intended has been achieved. Other reports of this ex-KS kit have pointed out the crudities of the armament, the haphazard fit of the canopy and the…
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Ilyushin Il-10 – Part Three – Sleeker Than You’d Think

My stable of Soviet fighter planes of WW 2 is very small – one Yak and one Lavotchkin. Not even a MiG yet. But they all seem to share a similar look – the look of fighters that have been developed by people who don’t quite know what the shape should be. Oh, they are…
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Wait. What?

I have just been given a conflicting story and am in the process of processing it. Pardon the odd sounds coming from my brain. Some of them are gas and some of them are suspicion. The basic problem surfaced a few months ago when I went to my local hobby shop to get another bottle…
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Gloster Meteor F.1 – Part Three – Just Outta The Paint Shop

Well, it has been a couple of days. We are in spring*, which means we should be getting warmer weather soon. But we also get the tail end showers of winter with the ensuing bad paint conditions. So I have been dodging in and out of the Little Workshop catching my opportunities as they arise;…
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Avia S-199 – Part Five – ” Daddy, Why Is that Man Swearing? “

” He’s an aircraft modeller, Dear, and something has gone wrong. ” The something started out going right. I managed to print out a sheet of Magen David emblems on the epson on strips of masking tape. I then transferred the tape to a cutting board and carefully made the roundels and the stars as separate…
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Avia S-199 – Part Four – Ol’ Stripey Tail

I appear to have learned something from my past experiences with Israeli fighter planes. This time I did not attempt decals for the rudder, electing instead to paint the 101 Squadron stripes. They have been very successful, and tempt me further to try to paint the rest of the ID stripes and Magen Davids rather…
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Avia S-199 – Part Three – What Colour Is The Colour Of An Argument?

Answer: Whatever colour you ask about in a modeller’s paint forum. I went to my computer to google someone else’s opinion about the grey/green colour of an S-199 in Israeli service. I encountered scholarly works that deteriorated into name-calling and vulgarity. I did not see any profile pictures of the writers but I can pretty…
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Tail Feathers

I have always been curious about anything connected to the decoration of aircraft. Look out your picture book of WWII aircraft and turn to the RAF section. Note the insignia applied to the average fighter or bomber: a. Two upper wing roundels in red and blue – in some cases quite dark but quite large.…
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Boeing B17 – Part Five- The Fat Lady From Wenatchee

Well, it has been a week. The Fat Lady From Wenatchee is finished and I am delighted – so much so that I will now deliberately seek out other aircraft that can be made into civilian service aircraft. There were severe forest fires in Washington State and British Columbia in the 1970’s and a number…
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The Masked Man – Part Four – The Leap Of Faith

Every model kit build has a point that I hate – in the case of the R/C ships a half-century ago, it used to be the carving of the hulls. Now its the masking of the canopies and the cockpits on small airplanes. The tasks were and are small but the daunting is big. As…
