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It’s Only A Stash Sale…
If you buy something you will never build and sell something you really need to keep. There is no middle ground. You’ve been coveting one particular kit for decades and loathing another for even longer. The stash sale o’ doom is where these two emotions are both in play. You will pay an inordinate price…
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Vultee Vanguard – Part Five – Hint of Wings To Come.
Look closely at some lines on this Vultee fighter and mentally add a bent wing and bigger engine. Yep. It would have been interesting to see what might have been if the later Corsair was available for China in the early 40’s. lad-based aviation would have been less critical in landing than naval service and…
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Vultee Vanguard – Part Four – Mind The Gap
Fitting an eastern European model together is like opening Forrest Gump – you can never tell whether you have a soft centre or not. In the best kits the parts fit, and in the rest they nearly fit. You are fortunate if the gaps are symmetrical and the surfaces parallel. Plastic strip and sheet can…
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Vultee Vanguard – Part Three – Hate, Loathe, And Despise
If I told you I hate, loathe, and despise kits that have separate blades and hubs for their propellers you might get the wrong idea. Many 1/72 planes have this feature and the two, three, or four-bladed props sandwich in between a hub and a spinner and end up looking fine. I reserve my negative…
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Vultee Vanguard – Part Two – No Surprises
An afternoon’s footling with the Sword models Vultee Vanguard has proved enjoyable, if not exactly flawless. In fact ” flawless ” never describes the short-run kits form Eastern Europe. In some case ” flawful ” would be a better use of language. In the worst cases language is your final resort, but send the family…
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Vultee Vanguard – Part One – Stash Sale Star
The acquisition of a Vultee Vanguard was one of those serendipitous moments – a stash was being thinned, the sales day was ending, the owner was marking things down, and I had $ 15 left. Now the painful part – the decision whether to assign this one to the USAAF, the RCAF, or the Nationalist…
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Desperate Modellers
Every time you encounter a model of the Eiffel Tower made of matchsticks, doff your hat and stand silent for a minute. You are in the presence of death. The person who spent six months making the model – and paid $ 50.25 for glue and wooden sticks – was a fine human being. Perhaps…
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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…
The Little World
Close focus on the world of scale models
The Little World 