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Bristol Bulldog – Part One – Viral Week
We copped a 5-day lockdown here in Western Australia when Covid transmission occurred associated with a quarantine hotel. Which sounds trifling when you compare it to other places in the world that had been devastated. But we were in a legal and geographic position to take it seriously and did so. With a bit of…
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Politically Incorrect Modelling
Model kit building can be a harmless hobby or a fiendish socio-political plot. It all depends on who is telling the story. In Australia we are currently out of favour with Communist China, and seem set to be castigated further as a pact between the UK, US, and Australia is established. As a side-show, the…
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Red Sky At Night – Airbrusher’s Delight
Or was that in the morning? It’s so hard to tell with these old folk sayings. The people who say them to you are old folk and they generally forget what they came in the room for anyway… I had no idea when I embarked upon a life of chromatic crime – also known as…
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Supermarine Stranraer – Part Six – The Ghost of Gleet Bay
One day FY-B…old No. 915…will be bobbing off the buoy at RCAF GLEET BAY along with the other floatplanes and flying boats of the Coastal Command. I am still working out in my mind a way of displaying these ships in the water without massive sea sculptures. Wish me luck. 915 represents a lot of…
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Supermarine Stranraer – Part Five – A Headache?
Faced with the choice of undercoats for the Stranraer, I may have chosen the hard one…white. I use Mr Surfacer 1000 of most of my models and appreciate the smooth grey satin finish it gives. I frequently forget to check it carefully enough for disruptions, but that is carelessness on my part – not a…
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Supermarine Stranraer – Part Four – You Can Glue…
With your fingers crossed. This is the normal mode of operation when cabane and inter-plane struts are concerned. With Czech kits the legs are also intertwined and you run the risk of falling sideways off the stool in the workshop. Matchbox made the process a little less fraught by sectioning the upper wing in three…
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Supermarine Stranraer – Part Three – in For A Penny
If you look very carefully at the image of the Stranraer with the lower wings in place you’ll see two things: a. The fit of the wings and tailplanes was darn near perfect. No putty needed and only the merest whisper of cyanoacrylate to seal the top of the wing. b. There were tiny little…
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Supermarine Stranraer – Part Two – The Green Lizard
Well, that’s what it looked like… The fit of the Matchbox Stranraer fuselage was exemplary. I needed no filler on the centre seams at all. The dorsal gun area, however, needed some careful fairing in to look realistic. That’s a heavy covering of Mr. Hobby white putty you see in the heading image and it…
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Supermarine Stranraer – Part One – Matchbox March
The Flory modelling group are going to embark upon a fun build every year – Matchbox March. They intend to build the classic old Matchbox kits – some with enamel paints – much as they might have been done in the 70’s and 80’s. I intended to follow along myself with one of Paul’s stash…
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The Commemorative Scheme
We’ve all seen one that we liked – and ten that made us wince. I mean the commemorative scheme applied to a current airplane in someone’s roster. It may be a warplane, a civil airliner, or a private plane. It might be an R/C model or a static one. But as soon as you see…
The Little World
Close focus on the world of scale models
The Little World 