Category: Uncategorized
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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…
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Albatros D.III – Part One – The Competing Baggie
When I looked at this 50¢ baggie that my friend Paul gave me, I wondered if it was a remould of a previous Airfix product. No, apparently – the old Albatros I built in 1959 was a D.V and this one is a D. III…at least dating from 1963. The look of the thing is,…
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I Learns A Waluable Lesson…
In undoubted proof that you are never too old to learn, I have. Learned, that is…the old just comes with the territory. Shooting my scale model reports for this column, I follow a regular pattern. An introduction with the kit’s box, instructions, sprue trees, and decal sheet, then a number of building stages, then a…
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Bright Or Blight?
Are the colourful liveries spoiling us? If you are a scale hot rod or custom car builder, just quit reading now. This column has nothing to tell you. If you are an armour person, you can also go make a dark brown cup of coffee with flakes of rust in it. If you are an…
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Highly Desirable
And highly detailed. And highly priced. And highly unavailable. Hi-lee-hi-low. Hi-lup-a-pup. And that’s another magazine down the drain. I used to buy modelling magazines when I was a kid. For cars to begin with and later for scale models or military models. Model boats kept me going for years. I would read the how-to-do it…
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Savoia Marchetti SM.81 – Part Four – Stop Laughing
This is serious. That’s an Australian joke, for the overseas readers. For the locals, its a historic Australian cartoon. Go look it up. The Bulletin long ago. In my case the risible arose because I needed to occlude the window spaces of the Pipistrello before painting. I’d deliberately left out the bulls-eye plastic windows that…
The Little World 