Category: subassembly
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RCAF Twin Otter – Part Three – Bare But Clean

After building a number of Airfix and Italeri 1:72 models with rather comprehensive interiors, I am not sure I’m pleased with the approach Revell have taken with the Twin Otter. The cockpit is fine; seats, control columns, and instruments in a closed space. Painted light grey/dark grey and with the added fillip of seatbelt decals…
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Grumman F9F-2 Panther – Part Three – You Only Forget Once

Putting together a model of a jet airplane is pretty straightforward in comparison to a biplane or a WWII bomber. Fewer parts, no propellors, and usually a much sturdier undercarriage. But there is one thing that most modern jets have in common – tricycle landing gear and a tendency to sit on their tails. The…
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Grumman F9F-2 Panther – Part Two – Tubby Little Devil

The cockpit assembly of the Panther has just been completed and I must say it’s pretty nice for a $ 20 model. 5-piece, and some fine moulding on the sidewalls and instrument panel. And for a change the panel decal actually fit the piece. Micro-Sol doesn’t hurt either. The interior of the fuselage is…
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Vickers Wellington Mk 1C – Part Three – Lemme Up Youse Mugs!

I’ll murdalize ya! Just lemme up! The building table was well in use in our heading shot as I sought to get the tailplanes level and even on the Wellington Mk 1C. The fuselage had been cemented with Humbrol Poly tube cement due to an article I found featuring a build of this same plane.…
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Vickers Wellington Mk 1C – Part Two – More Poles

Our heading image is very close to the version of the Wellington Mk 1C that I am building, though in the case of this plane it has the later grey and grey/green upper works rather than the green/brown. But it provides painting hints that Italeri have left out of their instructions, so I am grateful.…
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Gloster Meteor F.1 – Part Two – A Grey Week

Actually it has been quite a bright week, weather and all things considered. But it has been a week of grey toil on the Gloster Meteor – and here are the results so far on the Ess Bend shop floor. The heading image is a dry fit of fuselage to wing unit. I need to…
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Boeing B-17 – Part Four – Bombing A Different Enemy

As soon as I asked Google to show me B-17’s in Canada I got all the old RCAF pictures I had already seen, plus lots of USAAF shots. And then down at the bottom of a long search something new started to pop up. The civilian B-17. A few had been converted to private planes…
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Boeing B-17 – Part Three – A Slight Detour

My projected mail plane needs to lose the upper and ball turret. The Academy people have not supplied blanking plates for these two gun positions so I need to occlude them with some scratch building. However, I started out with the basic cockpit and bomb bay assembly. The interior is supposedly chromate green according to…
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The Masked Man – Part Four – The Leap Of Faith

Every model kit build has a point that I hate – in the case of the R/C ships a half-century ago, it used to be the carving of the hulls. Now its the masking of the canopies and the cockpits on small airplanes. The tasks were and are small but the daunting is big. As…
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The Cockpit – Part Three – The Pen Is Mightier Than The Canopy

You’ve read before in this column about using a drafting pen as an instrument to paint the frames of a model airplane canopy. It is a perfectly valid technique – and one that I use all the time. If I am going to attach the canopy later with PVA glue, I can sit with it…
