Category: Scale Models
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Gloster Gladiator Mk I – Part Three – The Mandate Of Heaven
Or of the Gloster Aircraft Company. The Gladiator is complete and ready to join the Swu Ping Provincial Air Army. The delightful thing about the SPPAA is that they have a variety of paints with which to decorate their aircraft. Oh, they do follow the guidelines provided by Nanking, but Nanking is a long way…
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Gloster Gladiator Mk I – Part Two – One Day’s Work
Every fortnight or so I visit a private home for a friendly scale modelling session with a group separate from my normal modelling club. The experience can be quite different. I enjoy the routine of each experience, but I keep them separate in my mind. Oddly, one of the other participants in the home sessions…
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Gloster Gladiator Mk I – Part One – I’m 14 Again
The last time I built an Airfix Gladiator I was 14 and had 50¢ to spend. I am older than that now, and richer, and glad to see that Airfix have kept up the pace – issuing this new kit a couple of years ago. It is vastly more detailed, with weighted tyres, alternate propellers,…
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Lima Beans And Spinach
Some people like lima beans. Some like spinach. Some cannot stand either vegetable*. If they are in a restaurant it’s easy – they don’t order either. If they are eating at the family table or someone else’s house the problem becomes more difficult. They may have a heaping helping steaming there on the plate and…
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Styrene Broker – Part One
Like a stock broker, but smelling of cement, not gin. A recent conversation with another modeller about yet a third hobbyist who is late, led to the question of what will be done with his accumulated scale model production. A great deal of it resides at his former hobby club, and is magnificent, but somewhat…
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Westland Whirlwind – Part Three – The Admiral’s Barge
Part of my research material about this green -and-white helicopter suggests that it wore these colour so that it could function as an ornate flying Admiral’s barge for part of the Royal Navy. Other sources assign it a training role at a Naval Air Station. Whichever is correct – and they both may be –…
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Westland Whirlwind – Part Two – Building Someone Else’s Memories
This Westland helicopter model of the late 50’s from Airfix seems to figure largely in the memories of other people. Everyone I have shown the box to seems to have built it back in the day and are scathing about it. I am fresh to the neighbourhood and am starting to feel somewhat wary –…
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Westland Whirlwind – Part One – A Green Stranger
The Vintage Classic shelf again – this time something I have never built before – the Airfix Westland Whirlwind HAS.22. In reality, it was a Sikorsky S-55 sold to the Royal Navy. The original kit is apparently of late 50’s vintage though I never saw one in shops in Canada. Basic, as you would expect,…
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Be Prepared To Be Wrong
Those of you who are married will find it a familiar feeling… But making mistakes in scale modelling is slightly different from the errors experienced during marital bliss. For one, they are quieter… And less permanent. You can paint something wrong, or badly, and realise it…and never do it again…without having to hear about it…
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A7 Corsair II – Part Six – Library Build Champ
This is the first aircraft that I’ve built in the Cambridge Library – not in the UK, but in Floreat, Western Australia. The venue has allowed a small group of plastic modellers to have a facilities room on alternate Saturday afternoons for a model-building meeting. We share the space with slightly bemused students who effect…
The Little World 