Category: Uncategorized
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The Bad Decision
Steel yourself – there will be some serious soul-searching in this post. You are going to have to confront your own failures. As for me, I’m going to hide mine by pretending that I never make mistakes. Anything that goes wrong is someone else’s fault – even if there is no-one within 500 yds of…
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Repressed Desires And the Scale Modeller
I have come to this topic from writing another column dedicated to selling photographic goods. It occurred to me that if there is an id in the camera shop, there is also likely to be one in the hobby shop. I turned over the thought that Sigmund Freud might have been a model train buff,…
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The 2018 Catalogue
I have just been doing my extensive professional research…that’s code for surfing the internet…and studied the 2018 catalogue for a firm that makes model trains. They are a historic firm that entered into the plastic toy trade at least 50 years ago from a long association with the tinware business. I had the privilege of…
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Hawker Hurricane Mk II – Part Four – The Next Grievous Error
Well, I added one today. The next foolish error. The one that separates the men from the boys. And I know which side I’m on… I had masked the new Hawker Hurricane Mk II very well and I was ready to shoot the upper works. As it was a cold day. I selected lacquer thinner…
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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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Hawker Hurricane Mk II – Part Two – Ahhhhh, Chooo!
Oops. Sniff. Looks like it is all together…. Well, it almost seems like that with Hobby Boss. You sit there idly scraping down a seam line…that is nearly perfect anyway…and then you dry fit a couple of parts and then you decide to glue one in… And the thing is done. It’s not quite that…
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The Cost Of The Kit
I was standing in an Aisle Of Doom and calculating. The Aisle is located in my local hobby shop and is named because once I go there I am doomed to buy something. The shop has several Aisles – some dedicated to trains, some to airplanes. One is given over to paints and chemicals. All are…
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The Aisle Of The Darned
Never mind the Isle Of The Damned or the Isle Of The Doomed – they are just comic book fiction. We have a real Aisle Of The Darned at my local hobby shop. From the start of it to the end, it is shelf after shelf of paint. No-one I know has ever successfully traversed…
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Bristol Benheim Mk I – Part Four – The Museum Aircraft
So why does a Bristol Blenheim Mk I bomber – a quintessentially early war RAF light bomber – show up in the Bomber Command hall of Stein’s Air World? I mean apart from the fact that there was a kit on the shelf at Stanbridge’s Hobby Shop and I had money in my pocket… If…
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Bristol Blenheim Mk I – Part Three – Goodbad Badgood Ideas
You know what a goodbad idea is? it’s a brilliant thought that you have had, carried out, and been sorry for. The opposite is a badgood idea…You’ve done something dodgy that has turned out well. The ratio of the two in some fields is 4:1…in politics 40:1. The best thing about the goodbad is that…
The Little World 