Category: Uncategorized
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Piasecki Army Mule – Part Two – Army Mule = Navy Retriever.

The Piasecki H25 Army Mule helicopter was not a very big lifter – even for a twin-rotor aircraft. None of the helicopters of the 50’s period were – they were limited by what their aero engines could do. The H 25 has a twin-row radial engine buried in the fuselage, but it is a small…
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Piasecki Army Mule – Part One – Buy Me, Boss…

Trolling the aisles of Hobbytech recently I was feeling discouraged – they’d had a big Christmas and sold off a lot of goods – but there weren’t many small kits left that fit my criteria; cheap, simple, and a western prototype in the propeller or early jet eras. I wasn’t able to spend big on…
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Hobby Money – Part Four – Pea Soup

Paying out for the goods, services, and experiences of a hobby is a natural process. You plays your money and you takes your pleasure. If your pleasure slackens or ceases you stops paying and goes onto something else. As long as you does not leave a string of corpses in the street, no-one is unhappy.…
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Hobby Money – Part Three – Finding Your Equivalencies

There’s all sorts of equivalencies that steer us around our lives. How many hours should you work to pay someone for working those same hours doing something you cannot do? How many if it is something you will not do. If you have good fortune, is it subtracted from their lives, or vice versa? Deep…
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Hobby Money – Part One – The Price Of The Hobby Versus…

Versus the value of the hobby – an eternal debate in many fields. Whenever we engage in an activity that does not immediately yield food, shelter, or sex, there has to be some calculation as to the worth of the time and money spent. In most cases the good stuff takes a considerable amount of…
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Donny’s House

When I went to play at Donny’s house I made sure that I went to the bathroom at home first. Even if I didn’t have to go just then. It wasn’t a problem with dirty toilets – not that at all. That was a school problem, but as long as you didn’t need to do…
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When Life Gives You Lemons

Or excess oranges…squeeze them and refine the oil from the peel. Then bottle it and sell it as model building cement. Or food flavouring. Or whatever – just get the customer to give you the money. Whether the resultant oily liquid makes good cakes or sticks model airplanes together effectively is irrelevant. As long as…
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Frugal Week Not Finished

Just when you thought the opera was over… I was idly browsing for OO scale building kits on the internet with the specific of Canadian outline. This sounds like a hiding to nothing, as OO is a British size and most of their card kits and other model supplies are resolutely centred on the their…
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The House Of Cards

Or ” How I Learned To Glue My Fingers Together Blindfolded “. I have been engaged in building a card model from a Superquick kit. This is a bus depot that can moonlight as an airplane hangar. The makers even provide spare signage with an aviation theme. The kit is largely die-cut. Most of the…
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Bell Model 47 – Part Three – The Bubble

Well, that was a surprise. I opened the Italeri box one morning at the modelling club and the helicopter landed, finished, on my studio table at 4:30 PM next day. And there was time in between working on it to put the camouflage colours on the CH-147 Chinook. I’ve no idea what this indicates in…
