Category: Workshop
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I’ve Got It All Taped Out…
Betcha don’t know where that expression comes from…Not from the electronics industry and not from the car body workshop. From the trenches of WW1. The British regularly laid cloth tapes from their lines toward the Germans to allow their troops to advance in the right direction without over-running other units on either side if they…
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Lockheed Lodestar – Part Five – My Father’s Son
I’ll say this now, at the risk of a haunting tonight – my father had some strange ideas. Not strange as in socially strange or religiously strange – his were more mechanically strange. They were generally a result of a problem that had to be solved, no fancy equipment at hand, and the availability of…
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The Waiting Room
If you think time spent in a dentist’s waiting room is difficult, try waiting for a paint coat or decal application to set. You know that you should leave the model undisturbed…but you can barely resist the desire to try the next operation or apply the next coat. I was like this when made my…
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Doing A Little Jig
And ‘tis not even St. Patrick’s Day, begorrah. I’ve been watching the YouTube modellers painting their planes and cars and musing about the business of the production jig. You’ve read about this before here in the Little World as I glue together bits of foamcore board to support aircraft during the painting process. I think…
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Yakovlev-3 – Part Three – The Dreaded Instrument
I used The Dreaded Instrument on helpless victims for 40 years. Oblivious to the screams and the smell of burning flesh, I pressed onwards in a mad orgy of torture. The only thing that would stop me was the end of the day or running out of electricity. In short, I was a dentist. And…
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Yakovlev-3 – Part Two – It Fits…
It fits…where it touches. And this is a no-touch model… It was all going swimmingly ( until the modelling bench hit the iceberg and the band started playing ” Nearer, My God, To Thee… ” and I was cheerfully impressed with the cockpit tub of the new Amodel Yak-3. The fuselage sides have a useful,…
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The Positive And Negative Mask
If there is one thing that model airplane building brings you to, it is the knowledge of how to do masking. You may do it badly or well, but you will be doing it for nearly every model you work on. I’ve just been taping up the Grumman Duck and it has prompted me to set…
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Shall I Break It Now Or Wait Until Later?
The people in the plastic kit companies who write out the instructions and draw the diagrams are to be admired. I would accord them all honour as I tied them to the stake and bid the firing squad take aim. Because they are very talented and artistic criminals. Their chief crime, past the price they…
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Squeeze Me, Baby…
I am constantly amazed at the sort of things that I can do with 8 fingers and 2 thumbs. I mean past the business of slashing car tyres and robbing poor boxes – I mean in the Little Workshop when the time comes to glue something. Because nothing ever cements to anything else without being…
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The Advantage Of Close Focus
Close focus is a subject that I take particular interest in with my photography columns – since I make scale models, I like to take pictures of them. I have special lenses for this, and lots of sneaky photographer’s tricks to make things look bigger than they really are. But it also applies even before…
The Little World 