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Avia S-199 – Part Two – The Old Grey Mezek
She ain’t what she used to be. The 199 had the name of Mezek in Czechoslovakia – that meant ” mule “. In Israel it was officially a ” Sakeen ” or ” knife “. It was unofficially a Messer…which is pretty good because that means ” knife ” in German and it was the…
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Avia S-199 – Part One – The Mule Cometh
I have been on the look-out for a year for a 1:72 model of an Avia S-199 fighter plane. Wouldn’t you know…a call at the local specialty shop for another product ( which I couldn’t get ) and a browse on the shelves led to the wonderful discovery. It was not a cheap kit, but…
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Grim Reality Vs Grim Fantasy
I am often puzzled at the selection of model kits on the shelves of my local hobby dealers. They’re good dealers and I love them dearly – just as I love the dealers in the eastern states when I visit them. Every one is different but they all have a certain feel to them that…
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Tail Feathers
I have always been curious about anything connected to the decoration of aircraft. Look out your picture book of WWII aircraft and turn to the RAF section. Note the insignia applied to the average fighter or bomber: a. Two upper wing roundels in red and blue – in some cases quite dark but quite large.…
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Boeing B17 – Part Five- The Fat Lady From Wenatchee
Well, it has been a week. The Fat Lady From Wenatchee is finished and I am delighted – so much so that I will now deliberately seek out other aircraft that can be made into civilian service aircraft. There were severe forest fires in Washington State and British Columbia in the 1970’s and a number…
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Boeing B-17 – Part Four – Bombing A Different Enemy
As soon as I asked Google to show me B-17’s in Canada I got all the old RCAF pictures I had already seen, plus lots of USAAF shots. And then down at the bottom of a long search something new started to pop up. The civilian B-17. A few had been converted to private planes…
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Boeing B-17 – Part Three – A Slight Detour
My projected mail plane needs to lose the upper and ball turret. The Academy people have not supplied blanking plates for these two gun positions so I need to occlude them with some scratch building. However, I started out with the basic cockpit and bomb bay assembly. The interior is supposedly chromate green according to…
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B-17 – Part Two – What’s In The Box?
What’s in any kit box? Hopes and fears, mostly. Hopes that the kit is all there and not fractured or warped and fears that the mould may have deteriorated with time. The decals are an entirely separate class of anxiety… In this case the sprues are nice clean Academy products, which may have been nice…
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Boeing B-17 – Part One – Why Do I Buy Famous Airplanes?
Why indeed, if I don’t intend to build the famous version? Because the famous versions are what sell to other people and that’s what the kit makers manufacture. The best I can do is look at the basic structure of the thing and see if it conforms to my plans …or can be modified enough.…
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The Masked Man – Part Four – The Leap Of Faith
Every model kit build has a point that I hate – in the case of the R/C ships a half-century ago, it used to be the carving of the hulls. Now its the masking of the canopies and the cockpits on small airplanes. The tasks were and are small but the daunting is big. As…
The Little World
Close focus on the world of scale models
The Little World 