Category: subassembly
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Shall I Break It Now Or Wait Until Later?
The people in the plastic kit companies who write out the instructions and draw the diagrams are to be admired. I would accord them all honour as I tied them to the stake and bid the firing squad take aim. Because they are very talented and artistic criminals. Their chief crime, past the price they…
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The Eternal Question…
To spray or brush. Whether ’tis nobler to dilute the paint and shoot it onto the tiny row of parts in a minute and then spend 5 minutes and 10ml of cleaner getting the airbrush clean again, or spend ten minutes brush painting the little suckers…and the next week trying to ignore the brush marks.…
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Tea Tray Mk II
Readers of this column may remember – or can search back – to read about Tea Tray Mk I. It was the adaptation of a cardboard box lid left over from an IKEA purchase that allowed me to bring my plastic modelling indoors when temperatures soared in the Little Workshop. The Little Office has an…
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Ungluing The Kit
Or ” Are You Stuck With it? “. A recent question on Phil Flory’s YouTube channel about dissolving old glue on a model kit – really old 1950’s Testor cement – was ably handled by the team of English modellers when they advised the questioner to put it away for another 50 years and wait…
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1931 Ford Model A – Part Six – The Ick Begins
I wish I had a vial of dirt from every continent. Then I could mix up weathering paint colours accurately. As it is, I use red paints for Australia and neutral browns for Europe. Not sure what Montana looks like under the grass. But nothing daunted, I decided to get the Ford dirty. An acrylic…
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1931 Ford Model A – Part Three – A Rolling Chassis
I was always surprised as a kid to read of motor cars being supplied in body-less form. It seemed like selling skeletons – frightening and unsatisfying. I had never seen a motor car in the 1950’s stripped from its chassis – and in a few years it would have been impossible to separate a unibody…
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Oh Sheet, It’s the Instructions…
I am fairly bright for a dim person. I can play Scrabble and do connect-the-dots puzzles. I have, on occasion, found Wally. But I struggle with the instruction sheets for the model airplane kits. It was not always thus…in the 1950’s and 60’s the instruction sheets for the kits seemed to be a lot easier…
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Junkers 52 – Part Four – The Interior Gem
Remember I once wrote that you should make a model of anything that you model? Well here is a prime example provided by Italeri in their moulding of the Junkers 52 – the interior fitments. As you can see a fair amount of the interior through the large rectangular passenger windows, I figured it would be…
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Vultee Vengeance – Part Two – The Assembly Line
I am never loathe to accept advice from people who really know how to do something well. Not so sanguine about being told off by those who have never done something themselves, but I’ve learned to put up a poker face and not react. Eventually they go away and I can get on with it.…
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De Havilland Mosquito Mk II – Part Three – Subassembly
I was right about the quality of the Tamiya kit – the first encounters at the dry-fit stage were excellent. No flash whatsoever, and small casting gates. In most cases the precision shears were all that were needed to separate the parts with no additional mangling. The cockpit has a great deal of detail without…
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