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MiG 17 – Part Two – Smarter Than The Average Bear
Look here, Prague. The Russians – crude stumbling peasants that they are…drunken, covered in ice and angst…can make a cockpit tub that fits into the fuselage first time. The tub is a precise moulding and the partitions that hold it in place allow both sides of the fuselage to approximate without gaps. It’s almost as…
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MiG 17 – Part One – I Buy By Price
And I buy cheap. My trip to the hobby shop was for paint – of course I detoured into the kit aisle, and of course I looked over all the 1:72 offerings there. The shop is one that I rarely get to, so it may contain things not seen before. This was so, but while…
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XF-7 Sky In The Morning…
Modeller take warning. They used to think that shepherds and sailors were the best folk meteorologists – reading the sky and waves for signals of storm or calm. Pooh – that’s nothing. Compared to modellers contemplating airbrush work, the sheep farmers and mariners might just as well be at the bottom of a mine. They…
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Martin B 10 Bomber – Part Seven – The Japanese Raider
The original of this Martin B 10 bomber was not a hangar queen. Part of a 10-plane shipment to China, it and one other were the last of their lot as war took its toll. I get the feeling that there were issues with aircraft maintenance, airfield protection, and crew performance that gradually took out…
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Martin B 10 Bomber – Part Six – Far Side Of The Hill
And we know what colour that is because it featured in a folk song… The shade of green that the Martin B 10 wears as a Chinese Nationalist Air Force plane is speculative – there are a number of sources that insist upon olive drab and an equal number that place the hue closer to…
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Martin B 10 Bomber – Part Five – Naked Whale
Well, you can see the corrugated strakes on the top of the Martin, and I assure you they are there on the bottom as well. I’m going to be grateful when it comes to the decals that – unlike the JU 52 – these ripples do not interfere with the decorations. The seams of the…
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A Good Club Mate
I normally do not bring other names to this column, but as this will also be read by my scale model club associates I will take the opportunity to pay homage to a former club mate. He has passed on this last weekend. It was not unexpected, though greatly regretted. He told us several years…
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Martin B10 Bomber – Part Four – If I Want A Pretzel…
…I’ll go to the bakery. The production of a complex fuselage is…well…complex. And sometimes the strange shape must cause the final product to come out of the mould a little distorted. I suspect this was the case with the Martin B 10. There was enough of a warp to render it impossible to set all…
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Martin B10 Bomber – Part Three – A Split Personality
And split on the horizontal plane, not the vertical. This form of model design is not as common as the vertical, but in this case I think it is perfectly logical. The Martin B10 has a sinuous body – and the proportions remind you of the Handley Page Hampden or the Dornier Do 17-K. The…
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Selling The Farm
Would be a darn sight easier than selling completed scale models. I am about to confirm this as I have put some 1:18 dioramas up for sale. It’s a couple of months away from the annual scale model car show and rather than haul the dioramas to the show and try to sell them there,…
The Little World
Close focus on the world of scale models
The Little World 