Category: Painting
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The Cockpit – Part Three – The Pen Is Mightier Than The Canopy

You’ve read before in this column about using a drafting pen as an instrument to paint the frames of a model airplane canopy. It is a perfectly valid technique – and one that I use all the time. If I am going to attach the canopy later with PVA glue, I can sit with it…
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The Cockpit Tapes – Part Two – Liquidation

Okay. You have looked at your 1:72 scale bomber and decided that you do not want to spend another $ 23 on pre-cut masks and you don’t want to spend a week trying to cut your own. What’s the alternative? Microscale, Humbrol, and GSI Creos would have you believe that painting a liquid mask on…
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Do Not Cock Up Your Pit – Part one – Wear A Mask And Talk Dirty…

Or ” Keeping the windows clean in a shit storm “. If airplanes were built like army tanks ( and some, Like the A-10 Warthog – are…) we modellers would have an easy time of it. Indeed if pilots were not such wusses and kept on insisting that they needed to be inside out of…
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Hot And Wet

I used to dream of this, but times have changed. Now I dread it. It stops the fun. Perth, Western Australia is occasionally hot – very hot. It is also occasionally wet – very wet. Both of these weather conditions are a signal to go somewhere and do something…but it is generally to the pub…
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Tupolev SB2 – Part Four – ” Red Is The Colour…”

” Of my true love’s national aircraft recognition insignia in the morning, as I rise…” This was an aviation folk song that Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie tried to promote in the 1930’s but it never really got off the ground, despite a headwind. Even when they offered to strike every Friday and bus in…
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Tupolev SB2 – Part Three – The Gallows…

I never realised how much my painting stand looked like a gallows tree until I hung the Tupolev SB2 on it for undercoating and colour coats. Didn’t mean to be quite so morbid… But the fact that the SB2 was suspended there and took its paint so well pointed out the basic utility of the…
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Tupolev SB2 – Part Two – In Russia Model Make You

If I had been in any doubt looking at the crude plastic on the sprue runners, it was dispelled when I got to the ” Made In USSR ” stamped into the plastic. I was relieved. Up until that moment I had been worried that this kit was an elaborate practical joke and that Alan…
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Percival Provost T Mk 1 – Part Three – A Decent Set Of Clothes

The Percival Provost is done – and inside of a week. I am not surprised, as it is a rather simple kit on a mechanical basis. That is as a trainer should be – after all, the student pilot needs all the help he can get and the flying school doesn’t want to do more…
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Percival Provost T Mk 1 – Part two – Just Wants A Red Nose

And clown shoes. And a tiny little car to leap out of… I am quite taken with the Percival Provost as a sensible little training aircraft. The idea of putting the student and instructor side by side is excellent, and the fact that it can be done behind a radial engine even better. The landing…
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Percival Provost T Mk1 – Part One – The Box In A Box

I was delighted when my friend Warren presented me with this Matchbox Percival Provost – inasmuch as it has passed through three sets of hands for free I hope to make mine the last ones before it becomes an airplane. It was found inside another model box purchased at a secondhand arms and militaria fair…
