Category: Scale Models
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Savoia Marchetti S.79 Sparviero – Part Five – Deep In The Heart Of…

Not Texas. Deep in the heart of Northern Italy. At the Savoia Marchetti factory cementing together the S.79 bomber and being alternately impressed and horrified at the way it is going. Impressed? Look at the detail of the shock absorber on the tail wheel. Not really terribly visible from the outside, but sturdy enough to…
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Savoia Marchetti S.79 Sparviero – Part Four – The Green Of A Service Station

A service station on the Autostrada. At 4:35 PM on August 7th. With the door open and the smell of pasta sauce in the air. Not that watery sort of sauce – the real thick stuff. Well, you need to know what you want to do before you do it, or you’ll never know whether…
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Savoia Marchetti S.79 Sparviero – Part Three – Clearly…

I’ll bet you are the same as I – as you open any new kit box you approach the little sprue of clear plastic bits with fear and trembling. Trepidation. Horror and anxiety. It is the equivalent of meeting the computer date for the first time. You never know what you are going to get……
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Savoia Marchetti S.79 Sparviero – Part Two – Parts On The Sprue

Looking at parts on a sprue is a two-edged thing…part of you applauds the precision of the moulding and part of you groans at the decision to break a structure into component parts when sometimes it is not necessary. The three engines seen in last post are positive things – they have enough detail that…
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Good Build – Bad Build

Or no build at all… We see a number of memes pop through our social media feed that have descriptions of ” lawful evil ” or ” neutral chaotic ” or some such applied to life. It can be on subjects as minor as how you store your bread. Well, why not apply it to…
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Dewoitine D.520 – Part Three – C’est Fini

And fini’d very well, I might add. The usual number of minor errors and hidden mistakes, but then that is par for the course. The D.520 paint job is not perfect – I was trying the freehand spray technique with the pressure on the airbrush turned down to 8 psi and a very thin mixture.…
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Dewoitine D.520 – Part Two – C’est l’Avalanche

One cannot do a Hobby Boss kit slowly – the very nature of the simple moulding does not lend itself to the dawdler. You either do it in normal speed and accept that you will progress rapidly or lapse into ennui. That is my philosophical explanation for the Dewoitine on a stick that you see…
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Dewoitine D.520 – Part One – Allo, Allo…

I have passed the Hobby Boss Dewoitine D-520 kit on the hobby shop shelves for a couple of years now with no regrets. I’d built a Morane Saulnier and a Caudron and the prospect of an diminutive French plane was no urgent call. But I’ve recently borrowed one of those profile books of WW2 fighters…
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Somewhere There Is The Land Of Giants

Little worlds abound on our planet. From my own RCAF WET DOG and Wet Dog Regional Airport or countless model villages in the UK, to Madurodam, or the giant German public rail layout or the equally large private US and Canadian layouts…there are slices of tiny life everywhere. I am prepared to award the title…
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Scale Model Philosophy 101

I once completed a very nice build of a very bad kit. It was not the worst one I had attempted, nor the best job I’d ever done, but it did bring into focus what has become my guiding principles. I hasten to add that these are not virtues or glories…just realisations about the hobby.…
