Category: Scale Models
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Bristol Bulldog – Part Four – Partial Masking

I cannot say that I look forward to masking all that much. But I recognise that it is an in-escapable part of aircraft painting in small scales. There are things you just cannot freehand with enough precision. This is hilarious considering some of the pictures I’ve seen of ground crew respraying aircraft in wartime with…
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Bristol Bulldog – Part Five – Plan Out The Paint

And I nearly didn’t. I was going along well with the painting and decaling of the Bulldog when I noticed that I’d jumped a gun – the instruction sheet showed the underwing report code being put on before the bomb racks. I’d long cemented and painted in the racks before I noticed this. Fortunately the…
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Bristol Bulldog – Part Three – Plane, True, And Plumb

Say what you will about super-detail kits and expensive models – you just cannot beat a kit that will go together cleanly with no strain on the components. Oh, we’ve all had kits where we’ve coped. Where we’ve managed to make one warp counteract another and end up with something that looks like the box…
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Bristol Bulldog – Part Two – Well, They Don’t Fly Themselves, Eh?

I’ll amend that. The drones do…sort of. But in the case of the Bristol Bulldog, it needs a human pilot to defend the realm. Airfix have been good to us for a long time – nearly all of their kits have contained at least one crew member to steer the ship and/or make the sandwiches.…
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Bristol Bulldog – Part One – Viral Week

We copped a 5-day lockdown here in Western Australia when Covid transmission occurred associated with a quarantine hotel. Which sounds trifling when you compare it to other places in the world that had been devastated. But we were in a legal and geographic position to take it seriously and did so. With a bit of…
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Supermarine Stranraer – Part Four – You Can Glue…

With your fingers crossed. This is the normal mode of operation when cabane and inter-plane struts are concerned. With Czech kits the legs are also intertwined and you run the risk of falling sideways off the stool in the workshop. Matchbox made the process a little less fraught by sectioning the upper wing in three…
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Supermarine Stranraer – Part Two – The Green Lizard

Well, that’s what it looked like… The fit of the Matchbox Stranraer fuselage was exemplary. I needed no filler on the centre seams at all. The dorsal gun area, however, needed some careful fairing in to look realistic. That’s a heavy covering of Mr. Hobby white putty you see in the heading image and it…
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PZL Gull Wing – Part Four – The Brown Gull

The aircraft depicted by this model was a sample put out by the PZL firm to promote sales to other air forces. It seems to have been taken up by a number of Balkan and middle eastern countries and used on both sides of WW2. Whether it was a successful fighter I cannot say, but…
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PZL Gull Wing – Part One – One Christmas

I get to choose my own holiday presents. The best way to do this is to go to the shops, buy them, and hand them over to the people who plan to surprise me. They do surprise me too – when they reimburse me. This was one of 2020’s lot – a Mister Craft cheapie…
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Please, God, Let It Be The Soda

A cartoon from my youth showed a man on the street outside a liquor store holding two paper bags. The bottom of one had given away and a bottle fallen out – smashed on the footpath. The chap had his eyes to heaven and the caption read ” Please, God, let it be the soda…”.…
