Category: Uncategorized
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North American Mitchell – Part Two – Sparring For My Attention
The Airfix company are pursuing a theme with their latest moulds of multi-engine aircraft. They are giving us far more detail than ever before and the walls of the fuselages and the wings are becoming thinner. When we see the edge of a window or an opening it is far more in-scale than the old…
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Why The Czechs?
Or why the Ukrainians, Poles, or Russians? Why the Chinese? Why has plastic scale model manufacturing become such a big thing in these countries? And why did it move so much from the original base in the USA? Why did the US companies sell up to overseas investors? It cannot be because the population of…
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Drat The Weather
We are supposed to be having an Australian Spring – you know, balmy nights, sunny days, outbreaks of venomous spiders and snakes. The usual thing. Well, apart from today’s sighting of a shark in the local river during vacation time. That’ll make a nice change from the venomous bottom feeding fish and the giant jellyfish…
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Following The Instructions…
To your doom. I’ve written before about the Czech, Russian, Polish, Ukrainian, and Chinese instruction sheets that we get with our kits. I won’t repeat the sly digs at the Chinglish, Czechlish, or other dialects involved – suffice it to say that we should be grateful for the kit and not be such English language…
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McDonnell Banshee – Part Four – Ready For The Canadian Hall, Eh?
The decals have gone on the RCN Banshee and it is ready for the display hall of Canadian service aircraft. The suspect upper grey is still on it and sealed in with varnish. I am actually delighted with the thing – and it is rather a massive fighter compared with some of the Korean War…
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McDonnell Banshee – Part One – The Holiday Kit
On my holidays to Melbourne, I slipped into the new Metro Models shop in Bourke Street to see what I could find. This Academy model of the McDonnell F2H-3 Banshee did not call to me at first until I turned up the side of the box and was staring at three colour profiles of Royal…
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Douglas Devastator – Part Three – Did I Get My Money’s Worth?
That’s always a pertinent question as far as my hobbies go. Indeed it also applies to clothing purchases, dinners at restaurants, and holiday trips. Sometimes the answer is no – for instance when they bring a tiny dinner out on a vast white plate and then hover like a Sikorski asking whether it is to…
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Good Morning, Walter – Part 14 – None Of These Toys Work…
Walter, here’s a selection of pictures from a recent Toy and Doll Collector’s fair here in Perth. I went to my regular exhibition hall on the day to see if there were going to be any scale model airplane kits that I wanted to buy. Short answer – no. That’s not the sort of thing…
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When To Reach For The Pointed Stick – Part Five – The Primitives
Painting and masking need not always be done with conventional tools. Spray cans, spray guns, airbrushes and bristle brushes are all very well, but we can take a lesson from the indigenous Australians who had none of these tools. For millenia they picked up a pointed stick and cheerfully painted away. In many cases they…
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When To Reach For The Can – Part Four – Rattle me Timbers, Matey…
The aerosol paint can for model work has been around nearly as long as I have, though I did not come to them as a resource until I was in my teens. The cans were small then, as they are now, and just as expensive in relative terms. An AMT model car might cost $…
The Little World 