Category: Utility Models
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” Oh. You’re Building An Old Kit…”
Perhaps. But the kit is younger than I am. Age is a number, rather than a word. It is certainly not a sentence, unless you allow it to be. If you are an older modeller, you predate most of what you buy anyway… Rejoice. The fun is on the workbench, rather than the calendar. Some…
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Do The Kit Makers Set Traps?
Is your favourite scale model manufacturer playing with you? Have they moulded a practical joke in their latest offering? Are they laughing at you in the lunchroom? You may be forgiven for asking this unpleasant question if you have just opened a $ 250 kit that has three parts and a decal sheet made of…
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The Design Meeting At The Model Plant
They have them, I’m sure of it. All businesses have meetings, and they all stink. In the case of scale model moulding plants the most important decisions are taken at these meetings, and most of them are held just before lunch when everyone is too hungry to think straight, or just after lunch when they…
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Seeing The Remnants All In One Place
Is good for the mind and bad for the soul. Or the other way round… The big boxes full of little boxes – in their turn full of unbuilt plastic kits saved from the wreck of a Perth hobby shop – that greeted me at my hobby club were an amazing sight. Part of the…
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The Clean-Up
New year seemed to demand new experiences. Also new work. So I rather hurried to complete a model before midnight. It was not hard…just a small one. That meant that January could start afresh at the club with a new kit. The stash owner always has the problem of which to select. In my case…
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All My Best Models Cost Under $ 10
Because they are the poor, sad runts of the hobby shop litter – or the nearly-dead ones that just pass from stash to stash without ever getting built. I give them hope and dignity. I clip their parts off the distorted sprue trees without making noises of obvious disgust. I sand off flash and rivets.…
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Mil 24 Hind F – Part Four – UkrAF
My first venture for the Ukrainian Air Force – and a good way to use an ex-Soviet design. Apparently the Ukrainians think so too – this Cold War troop carrying attack helicopter is doing quite well at low-level attacks and shooting down the larger Russian drones. The slower speed of a helo, plus its ability…
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Mil 24 Hind F – Part Two – How Green Was My Helo
I am prepared to defend my choice of blue-green for the interior of this aircraft for hours. Provided you bring the drinks. I sourced the shade from an internet image of Czech Mil 24 that they had handed over to the Ukrainian Air Force. It was remarkably clean in the picture but the interior here…
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Open Form Modelling
You might think that individuality and enterprise would be rewarded enough in scale modelling when we choose one of the options on the kit instructions. Or when we go the whole hog and get a packet of aftermarket resin or brass. Past that, there are the heady heights of what-iffery and enthusiast sci-fi to absorb…
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CAC Wirraway – Part One – The Challenge
Apparently that is what the word translates to from one of the aboriginal languages. In modern day terms it was one of the licence-built derivatives from a North American design – the root of which gave us the Yale, Harvard, Texan, and NA 16. And probably a Soviet copy somewhere, if they ran true to…
