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Ryan Spirit Of St. Louis – Part Two – Lonely
Well, he is lonely. But to give FROG/Novo their due, he is a pretty good representation of Lindberg dressed in period flying gear. He gets three slightly foggy windows to peer out of and a hard plastic seat, but then the real aircraft has a wicker seat in it that doesn’t look much better. The…
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Ryan Spirit Of St. Louis – Part One – Nyet, Tovarich…
Is not could be Spirit of Amerikan town. Is Spirit of Leningrad. First solos transatlantic airplane fly from Soviet home of revolutionary peoples but capitalistic newspapers disguise this. Soviet union always first in everything. Well, not quite first with this model. We get mould from FROG in decadent England and hero workers of Soviet Union…
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Aaaaand There It Is…
The error. The mistake. The blunder. The failure. Every build has one, and some builds have many. And there are a variety of them: a. The bad kit. Some kits are bad. Badly designed, badly moulded, badly boxed and badly shipped. In this case you are being beaten up by the manufacturere and the only…
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Cessna Crane – Part Three – You May Not Have Noticed
I just thought – you may not have noticed that the newly-completed RCAF Cessna Crane has been painted yellow. They do that in case you are likely to stumble into it in a darkened hangar… So I follow suit. I make up a mixture of Mr. Color lacquer – one full bottle of No. 109…
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Cessna Crane – Part Two – It’s Not A Trainer
At least, I don’t think it is. I think it’s a small transport aircraft that can be disguised as a trainer. The Cessna Crane that I speculated about in the first post appears in bright yellow RCAF trainer livery in every historic shot I can find of it. Nowhere so far does it appear in…
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Cessna UC-78A – Part One – A Cat Becomes A Bird
I’ve written before about the RCAF’s aircraft nomenclature and how it can be alternately logical and puzzling. I’m not sure if this is because it is an armed service or an armed service run by Ottawa… In any case, I leaped upon the KP model of the USAAF Cessna UC-78A Bobcat when it showed on…
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Douglas DC-3 – Part Five – Et Voila
There is a lesson to be learned with this Airfix model of a DC-3 in Aéronavale colours – and I must compel myself to learn it. It is a lesson of humility. At the start I thought this a marginal model – the sort of ugly cousin kit from an old company that had been…
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Douglas DC-3 – Part Four – Keeping The Faith
If you have shares in 3M or in the Ustar manufacturing company in Taiwan, take heart – your yearly dividend is assured. I have been masking the Douglas DC 3 and it has taken slightly more tape than would have been required for the full-sized aircraft. You need to have a vision as you do…
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Douglas DC-3 – Part Three – The Airfix Channel
Well, I’d watch it if they started broadcasting, and so would you. But this is not about the television – it’s about the Airfix channel that they put between the fuslage and inner wing panel of the DC3. It is so far the widest gap this side of Darien. Not on both sides of the…
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Douglas DC-3 – Part Two – It Fits Where it Touches
I am trying not to be discouraged by the Airfix DC3/C47 kit. I have chosen wisely to make it into a closed kit – the door fitting on the port side is truly appalling. Or perhaps I am looking at it from the wrong perspective – in the original form it has three mini-guns and…
The Little World
Close focus on the world of scale models
The Little World 