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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…
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The Cockpit – Part Three – The Pen Is Mightier Than The Canopy
You’ve read before in this column about using a drafting pen as an instrument to paint the frames of a model airplane canopy. It is a perfectly valid technique – and one that I use all the time. If I am going to attach the canopy later with PVA glue, I can sit with it…
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The Cockpit Tapes – Part Two – Liquidation
Okay. You have looked at your 1:72 scale bomber and decided that you do not want to spend another $ 23 on pre-cut masks and you don’t want to spend a week trying to cut your own. What’s the alternative? Microscale, Humbrol, and GSI Creos would have you believe that painting a liquid mask on…
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Do Not Cock Up Your Pit – Part one – Wear A Mask And Talk Dirty…
Or ” Keeping the windows clean in a shit storm “. If airplanes were built like army tanks ( and some, Like the A-10 Warthog – are…) we modellers would have an easy time of it. Indeed if pilots were not such wusses and kept on insisting that they needed to be inside out of…
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When You Cannot Figure Out What It Is…
You’ll know this one. You go to the tool section of the hobby shop, possibly with a definite purpose. You have need of a tool and possess sufficient spare cash to be able to afford it. You rush to the place before the family demand money with menaces ( school shoes, food, medical attention…). As…
The Little World
Close focus on the world of scale models
The Little World 