Category: Uncategorized
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The Beauty Of Preserved Aircraft
Don’t edge away – I’m not going to go all sentimental here. I salute the people who discover, recover, restore, and preserve aircraft. And who then let the general public and the model engineers in to inspect them. They do us all a great service. Because there are only so many old photos that you…
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The Sparkless Stash…
Or the stashless spark. Is it better to have no kits but brilliant plans, or plenty of kits but no interest? There are any number of people with big stashes who lack the motivation to build anything. They look listlessly at the shelves of plastic in boxes and nothing at all calls to them. It…
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Roland C II – Part One – Unwanted Baggie
If you wanted to know what the box art for this 1987 Airfix Roland C II looked like, see the heading image. It was one of the sad rejects in the club junk bin. Box long gone and no future for it. These were the Humbrol years for Airfix – spiralling down into a mess…
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Here’s A Pot Of Money For Someone
And I know just where it will probably be made… The lucky people who read this column will have a spray booth to do their airbrushing in. It might be home-made – in which case they can have it any size they like – or a store-bought one that is limited in width and depth.…
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Governance
Your chance to select a favourite form of domination. We have: a. Kitocracy. The person with the most kits wins. These do not have to be completed, though that would give you more credibility. If you are prepared to just total up the number of boxes in the stash and count that as the prime…
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Decals of Death
We’ve all bought an old kit from a garage sale or a swap meet. It may have started out in perfect shape, but then so did Hannibal before he crossed the Alps. Some of the kits I’ve bought still have elephant poop in the crushed old boxes… And they have sad sheets of decals. Sheets…
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I’ve Been To The Movies Too, Ya Know…
Whenever I sit in on a group of experts and listen to them tell each other stories I reflect that some of these are probably being retailed with advantage. In fact a few of the tale-tellers are probably advantaging through their teeth. None more so than The People Who Weren’t There. This is because the…
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Science To The Rescue – Part Two
How many ships have foundered in the Succitan Sea? There is no better way to find out if an old bomb is a dud than hitting the fuse with a hammer. Or, in the case of home-made decals, soaking them and trying them out. The 7 candidates were soaked, applied over Mr. Mark Setter, and…
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Courage, Mon Brave!
When it is right – defend it. When it is wrong – admit it. And when it looks like hell, strip it off and start again. There are times when our reach exceeds our grasp. I have just printed a set of decals with the inkjet that would cover most of an air tanker. They…
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Bass Ackward
The sequence in which we do things is critical – I learned that when shooting muzzle loading rifles. Only one way of loading really works. The same question applies when we are trying to get a soft edge to camouflage painting on an aircraft. The time-honoured method of the Blu-tac worm and masking tape does…
