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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…
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Hillson Praga Air Baby – Part Three – See What You Get When You Listen To Yourself
Particularly when it is the voice of experience and has arrived at wisdom through previous bad decisions. The Australian civil registration code on this plane is on clear decal film – the sort that the Czechs do well. The sheet is finely-printed and seems to be in register, but I know from past jobs that…
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Hillson Praga Air Baby – Part Two – The Human Dimension
Or perhaps that should be human dimensions. The small size of people reflected in the small size of aircraft. You wouldn’t think that with a lot of kits – the fighters, bombers, and transports of WW2 are a level bigger than their counterparts in the interwar period – and these again bigger than the WW1…
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Hillson Praga Air Baby – Part One – So Niche
Okay. Beats Me. Who in Prague has ever heard of Australia? Well, someone did. They sent out three of these little light planes before WW2 – probably because they had a manufacturing deal going with Manchester. The kit is on two sprue trees – one clear and one silvered. A tiny rime of flash but…
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The Valid Decision
If you want to drown in Official-Speak, go to Google and start looking up ” valid decision “. I often go and see what poking the bear will do before I write these things. In this case I have been preceded by academia, politics, and the sort of management that can close down a successful…
The Little World
Close focus on the world of scale models
The Little World 