Category: Uncategorized
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Christmas And Birthday All Year Round
Remember Christmas as a kid? Remember your birthday? Remember the present in the wrapping paper that looked suspiciously like a model kit – and the final minutes of anticipation before you got to it and unwrapped it? Be honest with yourself…if it WAS a model kit when the paper came off, you were thrilled. It…
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When Someone Builds A Better Mouse Trap
The world is supposed to beat a path to their door. Which may not be a good thing…if they have just put in expensive turf and roped it off while the sprinklers are on. Plus the place may be knee-deep in dead mice and stink to high heaven. We had one that died in an…
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S.P. – Part Five – So Shoot Me
I spend a lot of time puzzling about camouflage paint schemes. Any scale modeller does – they are the basic currency of our paint economy. In the case of this Polish armoured car, the intended theatre of operations was Poland and eastern Germany and the time was the fall of 1939. This may explain the…
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S.P. – Part Four – Precision Is As Precision Does
I had no idea what to expect with the Mirage model of the little armoured car – the firm was a mystery to me. I was pleasantly surprised. Precision in some scale modelling is everything…and in other cases it is nothing. Some makers have magnificent box art disguising parts that frankly do not fit together.…
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How Accurate Were They Back In The Day?
Depends on who they were and when the day was… I well remember seeing an Aurora Famous Fighter kit sold in Canadian hobby shops that purported to be a Soviet plane – variously touted as a Yak 25 or a MiG 19, that was nothing like either aircraft. It may have been drawn up and…
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Are Scale Modellers Just Overgrown Children?
We may be, depending upon who you ask. The secret to happiness is not to ask. Adult scale modellers of any ilk…car people, boat people, plane people, people people…can often find that other adults treat them with a snide disdain. Words and attitudes are discovered that suggest childishness in the modeller, and reduce them socially…
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Dewoitine D. 510 – Part One – Ole!
I am a sucker for inter-war French fighter planes, though I should have been terrified to have had to fly and fight in one. Flying might have been easy enough, but the designs give no hint of any fighting prowess. This one is packaged as used by the Spanish Republicans – one of my favourite…
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The Barnacle
AKA the shelf queen. The styrene albatross. The kit that has sat on the hobby shop shelf ever since the place opened. The Unsold Undead… It may be worse than this. There are items in stock in many retailers that have been delivered from other shops that have previously failed; I saw it several times…
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Belt And Braces
And a bolt and a rivet and MIG welding and a big bracket. I like my models to stay together. The increasingly scale appearance of some models demands increasingly fine attachment points for some parts. The shafts, brackets, and pivots that might once have been fitting into thick plastic sockets and pins are now just…
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Albatros D.III – Part Three – Little Pink
Which, if I recall, was the title of a Damon Runyan short story….and nothing to do with today’s topic. Some months back, in the midst of the viral shortages at our hobby shop, I was reduced to purchasing a pot of Mr. Surfacer 1200 in pink..my normal buy – Mr Surfacer 1000 – being off…
The Little World 