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Who Decided My Childhood?
No, I don’t mean my parents or the school teachers or the rock and roll industry – I mean who decided which prototypes to make into the plastic models that I built? Bear in mind it was a childhood in a part of North America that was under both American and British influence. Airfix, FROG,…
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Polikarpov I-1 – Part Two – The Corrugated Cat
I think Junkers and Ford have a lot to answer for in what they did to aviation design. The Stuka and the Tri-Motor were certainly successful in themselves, when applied in the right way, but they must have led many others astray – Polikarpov amongst others. The temptation of a monocoque skin in corrugated aluminium…
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Polikarpov I-1 – Part One – One Tin Fighter
Captain Frugal here. I have been given an ICM kit – or I may have bought it…I cannot really remember. But it did not cost as much as the examples on the shelf of my local hobby shop. It is, however, every bit as good as the higher-priced spread, and good for me, too. The…
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The Beauty Of Preserved Aircraft
Don’t edge away – I’m not going to go all sentimental here. I salute the people who discover, recover, restore, and preserve aircraft. And who then let the general public and the model engineers in to inspect them. They do us all a great service. Because there are only so many old photos that you…
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The Sparkless Stash…
Or the stashless spark. Is it better to have no kits but brilliant plans, or plenty of kits but no interest? There are any number of people with big stashes who lack the motivation to build anything. They look listlessly at the shelves of plastic in boxes and nothing at all calls to them. It…
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Roland C II – Part Two – Blue Whale
Say what you might about the shape of the Roland C II, it makes for a good small scale model. The interplane struts are broad plates and there are no cabanes. There is a good exposed engine, unusual fuselage windows, and two German fliers in enthusiastic positions. The gunner is attending to his duties, but…
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Roland C II – Part One – Unwanted Baggie
If you wanted to know what the box art for this 1987 Airfix Roland C II looked like, see the heading image. It was one of the sad rejects in the club junk bin. Box long gone and no future for it. These were the Humbrol years for Airfix – spiralling down into a mess…
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Here’s A Pot Of Money For Someone
And I know just where it will probably be made… The lucky people who read this column will have a spray booth to do their airbrushing in. It might be home-made – in which case they can have it any size they like – or a store-bought one that is limited in width and depth.…
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Governance
Your chance to select a favourite form of domination. We have: a. Kitocracy. The person with the most kits wins. These do not have to be completed, though that would give you more credibility. If you are prepared to just total up the number of boxes in the stash and count that as the prime…
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Fiat BR.20 – Part Four – The One And Only
My Nationalist Chinese Air Force is growing like Top Tze. Another bomber to join the Martin B10. Talk about strategic command of the air… This Fiat BR.20 was originally sold to the Imperial Japanese Army Air Force as part of a couple of stopgap squadrons until a native-built bomber fleet could be completed. It saw…
The Little World
Close focus on the world of scale models
The Little World 