Category: Scale Models
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What’s Brown And Sticky?

A stick. Now that we’ve gotten the classic dad joke off the board, we can continue to the real topic of this post: the cocktail stick. Also known as the wooden skewer, satay stick, or kebab stick, this thin bamboo or wood shaft is available in any grocery store or Asian shop. Bundles of a…
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Norcanair DC-3 – Part Three – A Return To Sanity

One can only build obscure European designs from the 1930’s so long… Eventually your gall bladder starts to complain. There is only so much weird and ugly that it can take. A French bomber in the block-of-flats style tends to stretch the imagination past the snapping point – eventually you have to return to reality…
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Norcanair DC-3 – Part Two – The Inside Seats

Very few paying passengers opt for the back porch seats on the Norcanair DC-3 flights over northern Saskatchewan. At least not after October. Everyone wants to stay inside huddled round the wood stove. To this end I have adapted ten seats gleaned from a Heinkel airliner of the 30’s. The expensive people get armrests and…
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Norcanair DC-3 – Part One -The Ex-Dakota

A former Canadian airline, Norcanair, probably got their fleet of DC-3 aircraft from the RCAF – if the big side cargo door is anything to go by. This is wonderful – I need a distinct type for my Canadian airport and as this kitted so widely by Airfix and Italeri, I am spoilt for choice.…
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If I Knew Then What I Know Now

I probably woulda forgotten it. I will have to be satisfied with what I am learning. some of the lessons are easy and some of them need to be scraped off the floor. I do watch other people at work on the model bench and on the YouTube screen. I am aware that the latter…
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A Club Day Need Not Make Progress

If you go to your scale model club expecting that your day will be one of production and artistry… Oy, have you got the wrong vampire… Your club visit is, perforce, a visit to a society of like-minded individuals. The business of scale building is your excuse to go in the door, but you need…
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When The Horse Balks And Throws You

Get up and get back on.* When you make an inadvertent floater in a kit build, finish it and start another as soon as possible. Find a kit that will require you to do the same procedure as before, but this time correctly. Remember the mistake you made and why it was wrong…and when you…
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US Navy Phantom II – Part Three – Repeated Masking

Sometimes I make work for myself, and sometimes people make it for me. This Airfix US Navy scheme is really quite simple – the top light gull grey and the bottom white – but the navy decided to complicate things by painting some of the flying surfaces in white as well. Indeed they also apparently…
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US Navy Phantom II – Part Two – The Sixties Return

In my case, without the hair… I don’t care – if the era came back with half this much success, I would be delighted. So far the old Airfix Series 3 kit is doing very well indeed. The basic structure went together at one afternoon session. However, it was never going to go together without…
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US Navy Phantom II – Part One – Airfix Series 3

This older Phantom came as a part of a legacy sale. It is a Series 3 Airfix kit – boxed, and from 1965. Even if the actual production of this box was in later years, that’s a long time, and the instructions, decals, and moulding are bound to have suffered. Since then, of course, many…
