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How Cheap Can This Little Bastard Be?
Gosh, I remember my mother saying that when I was a kid. Takes ya back, eh… The tool wall you see in the heading image was the result of going to Bunnings and looking at the prices they wanted for Tactix tool boxes and storage containers. These are not the most expensive items, but like…
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Where Does The Money Trail Go To?
When we buy a model kit, or a pot of paint, or a roll of masking tape, where does the money we pay go? I shop at a local dealer who has a good stock – I occasionally go to rival firms if they have special goods. In all the shops, I pay my money…
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North American Yale – Part Four – Not All Birds Are Yellow
You get the impression looking at period photos of Canadian training facilities that every aircraft is painted a uniform yellow. Wrong – There were more variations than a butterfly collection. I was as ignorant about this as anyone until I started to make aircraft for RCAF WET DOG. I got away with an all-yellow Harvard…
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North American Yale – Part Three – Canadian Peculiarities
It’s a nation that pours tree sap on its food. That eats strawberry jam pies. That considers chips in gravy and cheese to be healthy. Peculiarity is in the air. This also extended to the products of Canadian Car Foundry and the training airfields. Hence the odd hole in the side of the engine cover…
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North American Yale – Part Two – Cage Fighting
Or fighting with a cage, if you prefer. The business of welding together a plastic cockpit frame inside a plastic fuselage. Faint hearts need not apply. I have served my cage apprenticeship on a Special Hobby Avro Anson with a resin tubing structure and as a result I have been excused several centuries of Purgatory.…
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North American Yale – Part One – Exact Fit
When you find a pair of shoes that fit exactly – and they are on special sale – and you have the money – you owe it to your feet to buy them. And the same applies to model kits. I know I’m preaching to the choir here – I mean it’s model kit builders…
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Pinkish Semi-High Intensity Green-Brown
Or The Colour That Time Forgot. The most accurate recreation of something that never existed outside a paint designer’s cheese dream. It has no FS number but that’s okay – IPMS approves of it. The question of the right shade of puce to paint a Percival that has pancaked in Portsmouth has always been a…
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Legendary Scale Modelling
The dictionary says a legend is someone or something that has been written about*. It doesn’t specify that there has been any truth, or proof, or goodness involved the deal – just that it’s been recorded. That being the case I think we can look at legendary scale modelling… a. The kit that was just…
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Using Up The Mashed Potatoes
When you open your refrigerator are you faced with shelves full of Tupperware containers? And in each one of them there’s a portion of something you ate earlier in the week? And none of the containers hold enough of anything for a feed? What do you do? Why you tip everything into a fry pan,…
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Hillson Praga Air Baby – Part Four – It Was A Good Idea At The Time…
Plywood wing, tube-frame fuselage, tiny 4-cylinder engine. What could possibly go wrong? Well you have to hand it to Hillson Praga. They were stylish. The little Air Baby looks good from many angles, and if the history of the type in Australia is to be believed, the three examples that got here were successful. Part…
The Little World
Close focus on the world of scale models
The Little World 