Category: research
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North American Mustang I – Part Two – The House Of Wax
For the people my age, this is the title of a Vincent Price movie that will scare the pants off you. My take on it may scare you away from your modelling bench. But not me… This is red modelling wax. Also known as base plate wax. It’s used in a dental laboratory to establish the…
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Piasecki HUP Retriever – Part Four – The Model As Teaching Aid
As a kid interested in mechanical devices and particularly in aircraft and cars, there were a number of remarkably stupid ideas in my mind at the time. I would look at some fabulous machine and admire the external styling without the slightest notion of what might be going on inside. That’s pretty standard for a…
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Piasecki Army Mule – Part Two – Army Mule = Navy Retriever.
The Piasecki H25 Army Mule helicopter was not a very big lifter – even for a twin-rotor aircraft. None of the helicopters of the 50’s period were – they were limited by what their aero engines could do. The H 25 has a twin-row radial engine buried in the fuselage, but it is a small…
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Boeing-Vertol CH 147F Chinook – Part One – The Flying Bread Box
Okay, okay, I know. But that was what it looked like when I opened the box. It is the first of the modern twin-rotor helicopters I’ve encountered and I had no idea what the size of it was going to be. This is the second part of my fee-for-service I earned taking portraits and it…
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Unsticking – Part Three – The Results
Well the experiment went as planned – I waited 24 full hours before masking and spraying two mules. I checked that the red surfaces felt absolutely dry, then used both the cheap and the expensive masking tape to make a pattern. A spray with the vile turquoise colour and an hour’s wait until it had…
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Unsticking – Part Two – The Experiments
The mules were back in business today – 8 plastic panels coated with aqueous acrylic paint – 4 with the same Mr. Hobby gloss red that featured on the Piasecki Flying Banana – four with a Tamiya flat red. I sprayed, then let the paint cure in a hot workshop for a couple of hours.…
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Unsticking – Part One – The Problem
A recent paint job that required three colours sprayed onto a model aircraft fuselage went pretty well – the lightest colour first and then two more in layers with masking tape application between the coats. I have the business of dilution and air pressure pretty well sussed for the types of paint. Note that in…
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Morane Saulnier 406 – Part Two – Blink And You’d Miss It
The wonderful thing about the Hobby Boss easy-to-build models is the bad thing about them… They are exactly that – easy to build. You need to do the basic things like wash the sprues and study the instruction, but after that you find yourself going ahead in such leaps and bounds that you need to…
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Lockheed Lodestar – Part Two – Knifing A Lockheed
Those of you who have never seen me in a tee-shirt may be a little startled at the top image. I am hoping it has that effect on the owners of the construction company that used to own the Lockheed Lodestar CF-TDI…the one I am building at present. I sent them a letter yesterday asking whether…
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Boulton Paul P82 – One Special Day
One special day in 1938 the Boulton Paul P82 – the turret fighter that was to become the Defiant – was rolled out onto a field for the men from the Air Ministry to look at. They had seen it without its turret nine months earlier, but this time it had teeth. It was still…
The Little World 