Category: Scale Models
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Vought Kingfisher – Part One – Amos And Andy

An’ if you don’t keep on reading , you gonna get a nasty letter from de Kingfish…an a phone call too. Those of you old enough to know what that was all about will smile. The younger readers will not. But some of them never smile anyway. Movin’ right along, the AZ model of the…
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Vega PV-2 Harpoon – Part Four – The Carioca Killer

Admire the pictures, Children – they are made with the new focus-stacking technique learned from YouTube. Nearly every part of the 1:72 aircraft in perfect focus . The technique is so simple as to be laughable. I secure the model under constant lighting ( 2 IKEA desk lamps ) and focus upon the closest part.…
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Vega PV-2 Harpoon – Part Three – Underwear

Under where did you want me to spray? I am getting good value out of my Mr. Hobby Procom single-action spray gun – the one I bought with funds raised by selling off unwanted photo gear. The gun is a big chunky thing with just one giant adjusting knob and an equally large finger button.…
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Vega PV-2 Harpoon – Part Two – The Subassemblies

Or, in the case of the PV-2…the sub-hunter assemblies. Because remember that this patrol bomber in the hands of the US Navy and the Brazilian Air Force did sink U-boats. And anything else in the small ship line that it encountered. For an airliner it made a pretty mean warplane. The interior is SMS lacquer…
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Vega PV-2 Harpoon – Part One – The Mistaken Assumption

I am subject to misapprehensions from time to time. They generally don’t result in disasters, but they can mean that I miss out on good things. I can remember several occasions as a young man when I did not read the signals correctly and passed lonely Valentine’s Days. It all worked out perfectly in the…
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Bristol Beaufighter – Part Four – EE-U

It is not often I get to build a model of a different real aircraft. Of course the makers of the kits pattern them off real ones that they find in museums – and these can be built from the box. But if you do, you are just building what everyone else who has purchased…
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Bristol Beaufighter – Part Three – The Principle Of Opposing Forces

Relax. This isn’t a political philosophy book. It’s still about plastic airplanes. The warped Airfix Beaufighter fuselage has been tamed. It took all day to do what might have been accomplished in a half hour, but we were on lockdown and time was elastic. The warp in the fuselage also warped the perception of how…
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Bristol Beaufighter – Part Two – Ce N’est Pas…

Ce n’est pas de plus beau… Oh, it’s a Beaufighter all right, and a marvellously complex moulding design. But someone in India pulled it out of the mould early and hot and it cooled on the bench. So the two halves of the fuselage have taken their own particular set – and the interior floor…
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Bristol Beaufighter – Part One – The Beginning Of A Beautiful Friendship

I’ll just round up the usual suspects… I can’t think why I have not pulled a new Airfix Beaufighter off the shelf at Hobbytech sooner. Goodness knows they have had them for some time – both this version and a later model with a radar…
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The Display Trays

The first batch of display trays has come out well. You remember I wrote about the breakages inherent with moving modes about a club showroom during maintenance. Well these trays are designed to reduce this for my models. They are convenient digital paper sizes; A3+, A3, A4, and 5 x 7. Did experiment with the…
