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When You Wish Upon A Star
Makes no difference who you areAnyone who shoots at you canKill you dead. The practice of painting stars- red, white, or black – on the sides of tanks is no guarantee against 17 pdr shells or Javelin missiles. Thicker armour and party tricks are a bit better, but the best protection is distance. At 200…
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The Whiff
Of what-if. This topic has been raised before on these pages in a somewhat sardonic fashion, but it can also have a serious side. a. Much of the whiffery revolves around Germany’s Third Reich in the middle to late 1940’s. Lots of unbuilt designs for tanks and aircraftare trotted out and kitted up. Yet few…
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Should You Be First?
Here’s the scenario: Super Hobby Good Times Model Kit Cooperative produces the first-ever model of the Benoit-Farquarrson medium bomber. You can get it in Tanganyikan, Ecuadorian, or Moldavian markings – armed with either blunderbusses or cruise drones. There are PE parts, resin parts, and a genuine wooden voodoo idol included with the kit. Should you…
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Higgins LCVP – Part Two – The Built-up Barge
I can be no more complimentary than to refer to this Airfix landing craft as a barge. I admire barges. My whole family admired them – so much so that we built them for years for service on Canadian rivers and lakes. To our credit, none of them ever sank. The LCVP kit from Airfix…
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Higgins LCVP – Part One – Barging Into The Club
There are a number of people in my hobby club who make scale model ships and boats – and do it magnificently. I am about to join them but in a much humbler way – I need a workboat for an air diorama I plan to make. Fortunately Airfix have just the very thing, and…
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Perth’s Plastic People
Sunday morning at the big local scale model exhibition was a festival of wanderers – some with purpose and some with purses. I know…I was one of them. We do not dress well – in some cases because of poverty of purse…in others an equal lack of taste. No matter, we have paid to get…
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When Is An Apple Not An Apple?
When it is drawn as a diagram on the instruction sheet of a scale model piece of fruit. Then – particularly if the kit is from Prague – the part that looks like a Granny Smith, Mackintosh, or Cox’s Pippin could well be an aileron or de-icing strip. There will be few written notes to…
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Human Nature Is Optional
At a scale model competition there are certain conventions and rules: a. Models must be actually there. No good going around telling people how good you are. They are better at assessing you than you are. b. You enter your model in a specific division. There are 35,000 of these so it pays to be…
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” How Can You Waste Your Time On That Kit? “
This one? This kit? This vintage classic old Airfix retro sagger of a kit? How can I waste my time on it? You misjudge. You mistake the meaning of the word ” waste “. You imagine that anything not conforming to the current latest magazine or YouTube trend is a waste. Oh, My Dear… This…
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MiG-29 Fulcrum – Part Three – Smaller Scale
A smaller scale than I generally work with, but capable of real revelations. The Mig -29 appears in a lot of photos and artwork – and on videos of air shows and various combats. It always looks impressive – and massive. But building this model after completing the Sukhoi Su-22 has shown me how small…
The Little World
Close focus on the world of scale models
The Little World 