Category: research
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The Third-Party Direct Hearsay Evidence
That you read once, but can’t remember where. You know, the absolute shining truth that is too good to repress… The sort of tale that you tell to the other modellers around the table as they cut and glue, enhancing your status as the expert who has seen it all. With a bit of luck…
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You Can Be Damned
So can I, and all we need to do is pick up the wrong pot of paint. The colour question has divided people for centuries… and no more so than in the hobby shop. The number of paints available to camouflage toy airplanes is exceeded only by the number of people who claim to know…
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The Importance Of Amateur Expertise
Don’t leave knowing it all to the professionals. I belong to scale model hobby clubs that derive information from various sources. The members read the internet, published books, and many specialist magazines. They have local museums to visit and can meet people who have seen and operated the things that they are modelling. There should…
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The Underside
And differences in opinion. Nothing is more striking when looking at aircraft camouflage than the variety of colours and shades that the different air forces used under the Plimsoll line. A glance at any of the Profiles books, a visit to an air museum, or the call-out sheets from any kit maker show colours like…
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Canadian Valentine Tank – Part Four – Borden Baby
Or ” The Jolly Green Midget “. Say what you will about the green paint on this Valentine, it is the closest I can get to the distinctive colour on this tank and an adjacent Matilda as they sit in the CFB Borden museum right now. The colour illustrations that show these are taken in…
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” Your Thing Is Too Long “
Say what? Oh, you mean my weblog post is too long. It goes past the limits of your patience and vocabulary and you flick away. Well flick off, by all means – this column is for the grown-ups. It is for the people who can spend day, weeks, and months on scale model kits –…
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The Danger Of The Custom Colour
A custom colour is defined as any admixture of standard paint that reproduces perfectly some particular hue or shade. It may be produced by any modeller who has a spare bottle and a mixing spoon. In keeping with colour and art theory, it is best mixed from a light colour with careful application of dark.…
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Ever The Sucker…
I seized upon a new cyanoacrylate glue in the hobby shop. This one had the word “plasti ” in the name and that was enough to start the curiosity going. I suspect it will just be the same CA gleue that the others in the brand are, but I’ll have to wait to see what…
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Grumman Albatross – Part Three – Before 1965
If you look closely at some of my RCAF aircraft, they look odd; there is no lightning flash down the sides and the the flag is wrong. Wrong. The planes are pre-1965 with the old national flag on the tail. And if you look closely you’ll see that it flies with the Union Jack to…
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Do We Read Or Watch?
A good question for scale modellers. We used to have books and magazines to inform our modelling. Increasingly we turn to screens…sometimes to read, as you are doing now…but sometimes to watch an unknown person tell us how to do something or what to think about some subject. The video proceeds at its own pace…
The Little World 