Category: subassembly
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English Electric Lightning – Part Two – Club Day

When ya hot, ya hot. The heading image is the Lightning at the end of the second club morning – wings, tail, nose and exhausts all firmly in place. And there will not be a trace of filler needed on any of the flying surfaces. Laugh, if you will, at the raised panel lines. Snigger…
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Chinese Flying Animal – Part Three – Inside Out

This time the I-16 will be built to show off the exquisite engine inside The Soviet version had the side panels on and all the work was invisible. To facilitate this the sub-assemblies can be largely built up before they have to go inside the fuselage – a very welcome design feature. It is never…
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Chinese Flying Animal – Part Two – Ukrainian Jewel

I cannot praise the ICM model makers enough for this little gem. An aircraft this small could be a temptation to cut corners – to mould haphazardly and make just a few large parts. The ICM firm in Ukraine have gone the other way – they have finely engraved, precisely designed, and cleanly moulded. As…
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Sprue Spray?

It was decades before I figured it out. In fact, Airfix and Revell knew it long before me. But it finally took Phil Flory to wise me up. The 5 ” P’s “: Paint Piddly Parts on the Plastic Prior to Parting them. Oh Gosh – I counted wrong. That’s 6 ” P’s “. Of…
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A Good Day’s Modelling

A good day’s modelling can be a surprisingly limited affair – producing only a few components for a larger model, or only a few steps in an assembly sequence. We all like progress, and rapid progress if possible, but we should also recognise when the little thongs are rewarding. A day spent making the crew…
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Eventually The Kit Will Be Finished

Or the Earth will spiral into the sun. Either way, there will be an end to it. Some builds seem to take forever. You start out looking forward to a few weeks of building and eventually it becomes a few months. If the calendar stretches to an extra year, you know you have a special…
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Canadian Valentine Tank – Part Three – World of Wheels

I get on quite well with wheels in my model aircraft building – because I normally only have to paint three of them for each plane. Open a tank kit and start counting the round objects. No matter who made it – Germans, Russians, or British, they all decided that more wheels were better and…
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How Long Ya Going To Be?

There’s people here who need to go… Well, it’s not about that, though the topic is really one that can rivet you to the seat, if you know what I mean. I mean how long should you take to build a model? Well, if you are a model engineer setting out to build a coal-fired…
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Handley Page Heracles – Part Two – Wings Over Wetaskwin

This kit build has nothing to do with Wetaskwin, but if you have been waiting for 60 years to use that line, you just go for it. The sprue trees that made up this kit looked like a picket fence – or a game of pick-up-sticks; there were that many struts. The box art was…
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Canadian Valentine Tank – Part Two – Semi-Detailed

I am alternately delighted and dismayed when I see the interior of a model kit. It may be anything from fully-detailed to absolutely bare, and even the walls of the cockpit or interior of the tank or car may be problematical. There are moulds that concentrate their ijector pin towers right where you are looking.…
