Category: Scale Models
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The Toy Train People Have An Advantage
Model railway builders who exhibit their layouts have a pretty big task to do – they have some major haulage and construction to do to set up a display. Once done, however, they have a distinct advantage over the model builders who make plastic kits; the toy trains move. The model railway maker might be…
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The Visiting Club
Scale modellers who make plastic kits know that when an exhibition is coming up they need to steel their nerves to the sticking point for two things; the journey there and the journey home. Because the model that you spent three months carefully cementing together has a dozen points of protrusion – plastic guns, pitot…
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New Show
Old theatre. The Western Australian scale model exhibition took place this last weekend and a lot of people held their breaths. The long-serving committee that had presented it for many years past ( decades, perhaps… ) had decided to retire and there was some concern that the exhibition would cease. A new committee was formed…
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Fairey Battle Mk I – Part Six – Jarvis, Ontario
No 1 Bombing And Gunnery School RCAF. The Battle was used extensively in Canada as a training aircraft and target tug. Kept well away from the Luftwaffe, its only enemies on the prairies were the cold, the students, and gravity. Slow, heavy, but a good flier for limited purposes. The RCAF even fielded a variant…
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Fairey Battle Mk I – Part Five – The Hangin’ Tree
I am not a naturally cruel man, though I have trained in the art… Nevertheless there is a certain grimness about constructing a gallows on which to execute a model airplane. You start to think of Sidney Carton or Till Eulenspiegel… The advantage of it all is the ability to spray from all sides in…
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Fairey Battle Mk I – Part Four – Broken On The Wheel
In Prague they have a tradition of throwing difficult people out of third-story windows. Look it up. I can certainly agree with this when it comes to scale model designers who decide to make a resin hub and separate injected plastic blades for a propeller. I should be happy to set punji stakes or hungry…
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Fairey Battle Mk I – Part Three – Got It Taped
I have been trying a new procedure in my aircraft builds; dry-taping. It is at the dry-fit stage and allows me to build up a phantom of the cemented assembly and add more parts to it. I can catch cockpits wedging the fuselage sides apart before committing to them – it is hard enough sanding…
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Fairey Battle Mk I – Part One – At Long Last
Knowing that the Fairey Battle was used by the BCATP in the 1940’s meant that I was always burning to find one. Well, the coal fire went out at the Airfix works a long time ago, and nothing was seen here until an advertisement for a new Czech mould appeared earlier in the year. This…
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Model Car Sunday – Part Six
Out past where the buses run… Or modelling to your own script. The art of doing what you darn well please and then having the courage to show it to others. It is not the path all would take, but then why keep to the footpath all your life, eh? The display at the MCS…
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Model Car Sunday – Part Four
Overblown is my favourite colour. You cannot look at a modern motor car and not experience a heart-stopping moment. The colour – whether black, white, or grey – will be so depressing that your ticker will slow dangerously. You may lose consciousness or go into deep depression. Memories of the actual spectrum may fade from…
The Little World 