Category: Uncategorized
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Expansion, Contraction, And You – Part One
I’m not going to deal with how much you eat and what it does to your waistline, nor to whether your business is flourishing or failing. These forms of expansion and contraction form no part of the Little World. What does, however, is how various materials behave under various stimuli – heart, cold, damp, and adhesives.…
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North American Mustang I – Part Four – Yamaguchi And Spruance
Look ’em up. Admirals Yamaguchi and Spruance – opponents at the Battle of Midway. Both got an aircraft carrier shot out underneath them. But their subsequent actions when their carriers were unsavable is the point of difference. Yamaguchi stood on his bridge with the sinking ship and he and a number of other Japanese officers…
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North American Mustang I – Part Three – The Unholy Mess
Well, I gave it the old college try – or in this case the old Dental School try. I used red baseplate wax to mask off the Mustang I. It was old home week for a while there as I set up the bunsen burner and got the wax warmed up. If I was doing…
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North American Mustang I – Part Two – The House Of Wax
For the people my age, this is the title of a Vincent Price movie that will scare the pants off you. My take on it may scare you away from your modelling bench. But not me… This is red modelling wax. Also known as base plate wax. It’s used in a dental laboratory to establish the…
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North American Mustang I – Part One – Genius Or Moron
I cannot decide which of the two I am…and you will kindly not write in and tell me, thank you. In this case the debate will rage around a new experiment I wish to make in painting. And I need a suitable subject to try it out on. With most of my experiments and trials…
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The Brush With Debt
I went to the opium den today to buy some brushes. Not a real opium den, you understand – that would be far less dangerous and addictive. I went to the hobby shop. The crafty villain…I mean the nice lady behind the counter…was cheerful as always and waved me on to my destruction in a…
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Well, Boys, I’m Sticking To My Workbench
Yet again. Where the hell did that patch of superglue come from? I claim no record for the number of times that I have inadvertently adhered to the furniture. Not that I wouldn’t get it, but it’d be nothing to be proud of. It shows a triumph of sloppiness over organisation – but at least…
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When You See Behind The Scenes…
A casual question in the local hobby shop sent my heart to my boots. The brand of paint to which I had pinned my hopes – the brand that I had determined to change to – the best material with which I have yet worked – had lost their Australian distributor. What I saw on…
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Piasecki HUP Retriever – Part Four – The Model As Teaching Aid
As a kid interested in mechanical devices and particularly in aircraft and cars, there were a number of remarkably stupid ideas in my mind at the time. I would look at some fabulous machine and admire the external styling without the slightest notion of what might be going on inside. That’s pretty standard for a…
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Piasecki HUP Retriever – Part Three – The Temperature Gradient
Or ” How to build scale models without dying in the process “. The interior of the Little Workshop was over 42º Celsius one afternoon. No surprise – it was predicted to be a hot, still Sunday and the prediction was accurate. Also no surprise – this was Western Australia in the summertime. We saw…
The Little World 