Category: subassembly
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Soviet Hound – Part Four – It Is Never Open And Shut
It used to be – in the dear old days of Airfix and Monogram. You could buy a model kit that did things. Ailerons moved. as did flaps, elevators, and rudders. Canopies slid back over cockpits and wheels retracted into wells. Occasionally a bomb bay door opened and something fell out. It was all over-scale…
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Soviet Hound – Part Three – Delicacy Rears its Ugly Head
Or is it a frugal conscience? Or just inability to mix paint right? I wondered this as I inspected the Mil 4 model this week after spraying the grey undercoat. I had run out of Base White 1000 – my preferred undercoat for models that are going to be white or yellow – and was…
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Soviet Hound – Part Two – A Day’s Work
Since I retired a second time I have been busy being idle. It is a damned hard thing – you no sooner turn around than another thing falls off the house or someone comes to the door bleeding. It is no good slamming it shut and heading for the drinks trolley – eventually they will…
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Mirage 2000C – Part Two – The Gaps
Not a BBC series about a family in the marshes – this is a the business of dealing with Italeri kit fit…that doesn’t. I will be fair – the overall fit of the Italeri Mirage 2000C is superb – most of the panels abut each other perfectly. The only horrors are on the leading edge…
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Queen Mary – Part Two – Club Afternoon
I frequent two hobby clubs: The One You Admit To and The One You Conceal. To be fair, I change the designations around from month to month so that everyone can feel uncomfortable… The heading image is the amount accomplished at one 3-hour session. Airfix were precise and sensible when they wanted to be; you…
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Hawker Typhoon 1B – Part Two – Scratch
Even if you don’t itch. It’ll be good for you. The bare tunnel between the open radiator grill and the open cockpit on this model are extreme – even for the early days of moulding. Airfix and Matchbox at least gave you a pilot, even if he was attached to the fuselage side with plastic…
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Ural Starter Truck – Part Two – Straight Into It
And likely to remain straight, as well. The designers of this Ural kit are smarter than the average bear. The moulded the basic frame as one piece with springs attached and a number of extremely precise location holes throughout it. This meant that, even in the hurley burley of a club morning – with the…
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Hobby Boss MiG3 – Part Two – Day One
Tuesday at the club is always a balancing act – the opportunity to speak with friends vs time to build a model. Often friends win out and a great deal of manure exchange takes place. It makes the hobby all that more fertile. It is a good opportunity to work on a simple kit like…
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French Lancaster – Part Three – Strut…
Alors! As soon as you see a good idea – then a better idea – all the ideas prior to it become bad ones. Students of model kit design are particularly sensitive to this, because we pay high prices for our education. Remember the old model airplane kits you bought that had a slot on…
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French Lancaster – Part Two – Part Works
No, not one of those wretched Paul Hamlyn newsagency schemes that sell you a part and a line of guff each week until you either spend $ 2000 or throw the remains in the bin… This is about the little sub-assemblies you can deal with as the main parts are setting. Cockpit, tailplanes, engine nacelles,…
The Little World 