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Douglas Dauntless – Part One – The Core Aircraft
In all my model building career I have never built a Douglas SBD – the Dauntless – not even as a kid when there were Aurora and Monogram kits. For some reason I have held off doing so now. But a visit to Hobby Mania – a smaller retailer here in Perth – ended the…
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Snowball Effect
When I started writing weblog columns for the camera shop where I worked, I had no idea that it was going to be more than a flash in the pan – a management whim that would come and go as fast as a wink. Other ideas had done just that. But in the end I…
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Things I Never Thought About
Vs things I thought about all the time… As a kid in Alberta in the 1950’s the northern horizon was a worrisome prospect. We knew that it was the closest route for the Soviets to attack Canada and the United States by air. We knew that they had multi-engine bombers that they could arm with…
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Douglas C-47 – Part Four – The Romantic Gooney Bird
Do not adjust your set or your eyes. The green is supposed to look like that. VH – CGQ or ” Honeymoon Express ” was a lot dirtier in her flying days than she appears in the museum. Not a scrap of shine on her in the three photos that appear on the net. I…
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Douglas C-47 – Part Three – One Day
Well, it was a temperate and pleasant summer day and no-one needed me, so I just popped the top on the Italeri kit, washed the sprue trees, and got on with it. The component parts you see here laid out ready for temporary or permanent assembly were the result of about 5 hours of cutting,…
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Douglas C-47 – Part Two – Honeymoon Express
The plane I’m building has a real history – apart from being a special scheme on a set of aftermarket decals. ” Honeymoon Express ” was the lead ship on a paratroop assault on Nadzab in New Guinea in 1943 in conjunction with an assault on Lae. It is a good point of interest as…
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Douglas C-47 – Part One – The Gooney Bird Again
I built a Canadian Gooney Bird a last year as part of my Air World collection – a Burma Biscuit Bomber that has been preserved in the Canadian museums as a flying tribute. That should have finished my fascination with the Dakota/C-47/Skytrain/ Gooney bird for some time. Not a bit of it. I had collected…
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The Home-Made Decals – Part Two
It is the Ancient Modeller who stoppeth one of three ” Take heed, Sirrah, to what I say Or suffer along with me…” The experiment went ahead as planned with the porous paper, the Golden Syrup ( Australian version of Karo ) and the warm oven: a. Syrup brushed on paper. Soaked right in. Paper…
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The Home-Made Decals…Part One
Get more home-made every day. We are in the midst of a drought of decal paper in Perth. It may have escaped the attention of the major news channels, but I assure you the effects are being felt in the model airplane world. Particularly in my own little one, as I have discovered the joys…
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Brewster Bermuda – Part Eight – A Lovely Surprise
Well, mustard gas is always a surprise anyway, but this experimental Brewster Bermuda adds a stylish note to it. Not sure if I’m proud to have made an experimental Canadian gas plane of it, but the other options weren’t all that much better. The new technique of masking off the greenhouse entirely and temporarily gluing…
The Little World
Close focus on the world of scale models
The Little World 