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Dewoitine D. 510 – Part One – Ole!
I am a sucker for inter-war French fighter planes, though I should have been terrified to have had to fly and fight in one. Flying might have been easy enough, but the designs give no hint of any fighting prowess. This one is packaged as used by the Spanish Republicans – one of my favourite…
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The Barnacle
AKA the shelf queen. The styrene albatross. The kit that has sat on the hobby shop shelf ever since the place opened. The Unsold Undead… It may be worse than this. There are items in stock in many retailers that have been delivered from other shops that have previously failed; I saw it several times…
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Belt And Braces
And a bolt and a rivet and MIG welding and a big bracket. I like my models to stay together. The increasingly scale appearance of some models demands increasingly fine attachment points for some parts. The shafts, brackets, and pivots that might once have been fitting into thick plastic sockets and pins are now just…
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Albatros D.III – Part Four – Red But Not Barren
An internet site claims that Manfred v. Richthofen flew a red, yellow-tailed Albatross D.III at some stage of his career. I have no idea if this is true. However, I like the idea of breaking up the all-red of the Revell kit’s scheme so this was as good a choice as any. I recognise the…
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Albatros D.III – Part Three – Little Pink
Which, if I recall, was the title of a Damon Runyan short story….and nothing to do with today’s topic. Some months back, in the midst of the viral shortages at our hobby shop, I was reduced to purchasing a pot of Mr. Surfacer 1200 in pink..my normal buy – Mr Surfacer 1000 – being off…
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Albatros D.III – Part Two – Sleek
There only seem to be two types of WW1 aircraft – the impossibly sleek and the improbably bulky. This Albatros fits the first category, as would Pfalz and Roland machines. The second type is represented in my mind by the Bristol fighters and the Russian bombers. Brought about by different design bureaux comprised of different…
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Albatros D.III – Part One – The Competing Baggie
When I looked at this 50¢ baggie that my friend Paul gave me, I wondered if it was a remould of a previous Airfix product. No, apparently – the old Albatros I built in 1959 was a D.V and this one is a D. III…at least dating from 1963. The look of the thing is,…
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I Learns A Waluable Lesson…
In undoubted proof that you are never too old to learn, I have. Learned, that is…the old just comes with the territory. Shooting my scale model reports for this column, I follow a regular pattern. An introduction with the kit’s box, instructions, sprue trees, and decal sheet, then a number of building stages, then a…
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Bright Or Blight?
Are the colourful liveries spoiling us? If you are a scale hot rod or custom car builder, just quit reading now. This column has nothing to tell you. If you are an armour person, you can also go make a dark brown cup of coffee with flakes of rust in it. If you are an…
The Little World
Close focus on the world of scale models
The Little World 