Category: Tools
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De Havilland Mosquito Mk II – Part Seven – Challenges Must Yield To Science!
Part Six of the DH Mosquito Mk II saga showed the dull and sad paint job that I ended up with after failing to think properly about what I was doing – I sprayed a matting acrylic too heavily and cured it under too high a temperature. I regarded the result as a failure on…
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Serious Money For Lighthearted Spenders
When you enter a hobby shop, do you do it with a happy heart? Do you skip in with a Tra La and a happy whistle? Do you greet the proprietor as an old friend? Or do you slink in round the corner of the door and growl at the staff behind the till? Do…
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I’m More Eco-Virtuous Than You Are
So there too, hah! Actually all us model builders have an opportunity to stick it to the Facebook/Shopping Centre/News bite saints who scold us daily about everything we think or do – particularly the ones who would deny us everything from plastic straws to bear traps. We are ahead of their game: a. Plastic straws.…
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Messerschmitt 109 – Part Four – The Production Line
I cannot think of a worse way to approach the business of being a scale modeller than that of a production line worker with a contract to produce a product in a set time. This also applies to the full-size workers who made the full-size airplanes – Some were employed and some were drafted and…
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Hawker Hurricane Mk II – Part Three – The Beauty Salon
It was cold tonight. Rainy. I adjourned into the computer room with a portable modelling tray to proceed with the Hurricane in some comfort – the Little Workshop was just too miserable to work in, even with the heater on. The task was masking the pattern illustrated in the Avia publication on Canadian warplanes. I…
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Ticking Them Off
Ticking them off is ticking me off. I mean the various means for producing camouflage paint schemes on model aircraft. Recently I tried the Silly Putty Snake method for making British A and B aircraft patterns. I had two pots of different brands of silly putty and had researched all the YouTube videos on how…
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Cheap And Nasty Or Cheap And Nicely?
When I came to Australia in the 60’s I encountered a whole new division of language. Coming from North America I had experienced Canadian English and American English – now I had Australian English to learn. It wasn’t that hard, once you discarded the ocker colloquialisms. Of course you had to pick them up again…
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The Little Workshop – When A Hunch Pays Off
I rarely go downtown these days unless it is to haunt the bookstore or check up on the branch of the camera shop I used to work for. The rest of the shops are filled with wonderful things that I don’t want and the streets are filled with people I wish to avoid. But there…
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And A Tip Of The Hatlo Hat* To…
Wayne Robinson. Who read my piece on canopy painting and replied – alerting me to a very good English drafting pen that could be used to apply precise paint lines to models. I went to the site he quoted, looked it over and spied one line in their advertisement that looked interesting. They compared their…
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I Shall Show You Ze Instruments…
Ve haf vays of making you pay attention. You may see und make your choice of ze conseqvences… No, no, no. Not that kind of movie. This is scale model building in the Little Workshop and we are all peaceful here.The only screams are when a fly walks over a fresh paint job. I have…
The Little World 