Category: workflow
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Nothing To Excess
This is a fine philosophy, but I wouldn’t go overboard on it… It is also good counsel for the people who make the moulds for plastic kits. I was dealing with an old Revell B-24 D kit from the late 70’s that had recessed panel lines and raised rivets. They were the size that would…
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What Everyone Knows…
Can be absolute truth, malicious nonsense, or anything in between. When your scale model building intersects with public knowledge, you would do well to determine exactly which sort you have. I have built glaring mistakes, and made a good job of them, too, based upon what everyone knows. In most cases, even if everyone agrees,…
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Grumman Hawkeye – Part Two – Filling And Filing
And not just in one stage, either. When you take on an older kit, you accept the limitations of the art at the time that it was made. You can build it with the skills of that time or with modern ones. Either way is a sort of compromise. Here we have a combination of…
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Once You’ve Done The Worst Of The Kit
You need not fear the rest of the kit. My club-mate Michael Marchant showed me the tank tracks he was working on – they were from one of those Czech productions that have multiple parts per link, and multiple links per track, and no fun anywhere. I sympathised with him but left before any of…
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Out Of Stock
But always in the catalogue. Sitting there on-line, sneering at you…the kit you want but will never be able to buy. You have no way of knowing whether it is only gone for a week, a month, or a millennium. And you have no indication whether its absence stems from the factory, the wholesaler, the…
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Can A Table Of Modellers Build A Kit?
Yes, if they do not all try to do it at the same time. A dozen pairs of hands in a small cardboard box is a recipe for disaster. Likewise, a dozen minds making up decisions about colour, marking, fittings, etc…fine if you are making a 1:35 scale model of the Tower Of Babel, but…
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RCAF Wellington Mk II – Part Three – Sub-Assembly Is The Go
When you are building a model in three or four different locations, it pays to view each of these workshops as a separate shop. The real aircraft makers did this – in particular the American ones like Ford who could count on a number of plants in a general area. They assigned a particular sub-assembly…
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What Do You Do When It All Starts?
Starts to go pear-shaped… Make cider, possibly. Or begin to panic. Panic is always a good choice as it gets the circulation going nicely. And you get a lot more done when you are screaming. Some kit builds progress well – they are logical procedures that flow from one to another as the structure matures.…
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If I Knew Then What I Know Now
I probably woulda forgotten it. I will have to be satisfied with what I am learning. some of the lessons are easy and some of them need to be scraped off the floor. I do watch other people at work on the model bench and on the YouTube screen. I am aware that the latter…
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US Navy Phantom II – Part Two – The Sixties Return
In my case, without the hair… I don’t care – if the era came back with half this much success, I would be delighted. So far the old Airfix Series 3 kit is doing very well indeed. The basic structure went together at one afternoon session. However, it was never going to go together without…
The Little World 