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Fiat BR.20 – Part Three – Nearly All Good
Nearly. 90% of this airplane is a dream to build and the last 10% is the sort of dream you get with too much cheese at bedtime. It’s the nose, you see. Italeri were faced with the need to make a set of windows as well as a revolving front turret and elected to mould…
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Fiat BR.20 – Part Two – What Are You Lot Waiting For?
Italeri are very wise kit makers when they include crew members for their aircraft. They and Airfix are two of the few who recognise that you can fill a cockpit with something rather than etched brass. And the modeller will have less hassle and frustration all during the build. My people-painting skills are non-existent. I…
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Fiat BR.20 – Part One – Birthday Bomber
Part of my big birthday buy-up last year was this Fiat bomber. It was a last-minute selection in a shop I rarely visit – but I am delighted with the prospect. Italeri kits always please me, and none more so than their Italian aircraft. They seem to put an extra level of care in the…
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Decals of Death
We’ve all bought an old kit from a garage sale or a swap meet. It may have started out in perfect shape, but then so did Hannibal before he crossed the Alps. Some of the kits I’ve bought still have elephant poop in the crushed old boxes… And they have sad sheets of decals. Sheets…
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I’ve Been To The Movies Too, Ya Know…
Whenever I sit in on a group of experts and listen to them tell each other stories I reflect that some of these are probably being retailed with advantage. In fact a few of the tale-tellers are probably advantaging through their teeth. None more so than The People Who Weren’t There. This is because the…
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Messerschmitt 410 – Part two – Expo Build
There are no build pictures for this model as I was busy holding down a table at the Big Local Scale Model Exhibition as it was being constructed. I had put out 6 of my airfield dioramas as part of a group display and as they did not need a lot of minding, I was…
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Messerschmitt 410 – Part One – Family Connection
You might be surprised at a family connection with a German night fighter, but there is one. Not my family – the wife’s uncle. A Mosquito pilot in the RAF in 1944, he was on night-fighter patrol over France when he encountered a Messerschmitt 410 Hornisse. He shot it down, the thing was confirmed on…
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Science To The Rescue – Part Two
How many ships have foundered in the Succitan Sea? There is no better way to find out if an old bomb is a dud than hitting the fuse with a hammer. Or, in the case of home-made decals, soaking them and trying them out. The 7 candidates were soaked, applied over Mr. Mark Setter, and…
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Science To The Rescue – Part One
Having recently made a batch of bad decals, I determined to investigate the problem before printing the next sheet. The surface of the previous ones was cracked and broken – and I reasoned that it was the brittle nature of the Tamiya Gloss Lacquer spray that did it. I looked out all the bottles of…
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De Havilland DH2 – Part Four – You Got To Push It
To make it go… Think of this as a proto-Vampire made of wood and cloth. The SOOTB Revell WW1 kit can be good or bad. So far most of mine have been in the former category. I realise that further construction may push the joke too far, and will switch makers shortly. But while I’m…
The Little World
Close focus on the world of scale models
The Little World 