-
Curtiss Helldiver – Part Six – A Pot To Peer In
Or into, as the case may be. A pot of paint. 10 ml of potential heaven or hell. A liquid mistake waiting for you to make it. I am a 10ml paint pot guy – Tamiya, GSI Creos, or AK Real Colours are the ones that sit in my paint rack. I’ve experimented with others,…
-
Curtiss Helldiver – Part Five – Jackson’s Art Supply
Jacksons Art Supplies – or Drawing Supplies, if you prefer, is a dangerous place to visit. Like Officeworks, Bunnings, or Dan Murphy’s you are surrounded by too many temptations to resist them all – you inevitably succumb to buying something and there’s the food money for the week gone. The kids will just have to…
-
Curtiss Helldiver – Part Four – Euclid Was Never A Scale Modeller
Because he could never get the geometry right… I look fondly on equilateral triangles and acute angles – many of my friends can best be described as angular and obtuse – and I like to see the geometry of the model airplane come out well. I wish this was the case with every short-run kit.…
-
Curtiss Helldiver – Part Three – Green Is The Colour…
As I have written before – it is the colour of my true love’s cockpit. But it is never the same colour as you see in the books, movies, or museums. It is never the same colour as other people use, and it is never the same colour twice. The only thing that cockpit green…
-
Curtiss Helldiver – Part Two – Diving For Dollars
The Sword model of the Curtiss dive bomber is one of the bargain bin purchases I made when a chap came to our club thinning out his stash. The whole thing in box was only $ 20…which made my previous purchase of an A-25 A Shrike from a retailer look pretty sick. The Shrike has…
-
Curtiss Helldiver – Part One – Airplane Rescue Shelter
Some people rescue puppies and kittens – some people rescue bums. Good on them, I say – they are caring and compassionate souls. I’m not normally this good, but I do have one virtue; I rescue kits. I did not start out to do my modelling this way – like most charitable affairs it just…
-
Having A Thin Time Of It
Since returning to scale model kit building and taking on the whole airbrush thing, I’ve been steadily making discoveries. Many of them have been through the mechanism of mistake and regret, but I’m happy to say not all. Yesterday I got to pet the learning curve without it biting me in the ass. The question…
-
Respecting Scale Model Authoritah
I do not know if Eric Cartman was a scale modeller. If so, I should like to have seen the models he chose to build. Police cars, pie wagons, and wide-bodied jets come to mind, but that may just me being mean. In any case, Eric was portrayed as a child with a firm grasp…
-
Petlyakov Pe-2 – Part Four – Yet Another Soviet Triumph
Pardon me if I start to sound a little cynical – I’ve been reading Soviet accounts of their air force in the Great Patriotic War. In various articles I’ve been told that three separate Soviet aircraft were the most produced planes of all time and won the war. The articles originate from within what was…
-
Petlyakov – Pe-2 – Part Three – Plugging Up the Holes
I had no idea when I was building model kits as a youngster that there would be a need to plug up cockpits, bomb bays, wheel wells, and every blessed hole in a fuselage. That was well before spray paint cans and any thought of an airbrush. Plain old manual brushes were the go –…
The Little World
Close focus on the world of scale models
The Little World 