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Curtiss P-40 – Part One – The Roaring Forties
This is to be a dual-build…two kits constructed at the same time to make a team for display. But the team members will not to be entirely identical – one plane is a short-tailed P40E and one a long-tailed P40N. Their common point of reference is the Curtiss design and the fact that both marques…
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Tool Time – Part Five – We’re There
Here’s what the Ustar people packed into their mini modeller’s tool kit – the kit I bought for the pair of plastic nippers inside. I’ll show you why today was a good day. The heading image was inside the cardboard case. That’s a 100mm x 200mm cutting board and sealed plastic box. Let’s tally up…
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Tool Time – Part Four – What Happened Next
Never glance. Glancing is dangerous. Either look deliberately or put your head down inside your shirt collar and see nothing. I know this because I glanced… To my left, as it happened, as I went to the till at Hobbytech to purchase the set of Ustar plastic nippers. I went past the rack that has…
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Tool Time – Part Three – The Choices On The Racks
I’ll confess it – I’m at a loss when I go to many retail outlets and look at the variety of goods on offer. I might go there with some problem in mind, but I fall apart when I see that the shop has half-a-dozen different solutions to it and a further half-dozen brands of…
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Tool Time – Part Two – The Positive Break
I thought it felt a bit odd. The nippers I keep in my travelling kit to separate plastic parts from sprue trees felt strange while biting into a kit. No-wonder – the coiled spring wire that separates the blades had fractured. Pretty good for a tool that was less than a year old, eh? It’s…
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Tool Time – Part One – Not All Tools Are Equal…
We all use tools, and if we are in the dating market occasionally they use us. Some tools are good – some bad. Some are expensive, and some cheap. If you go into the wrong bar you will get the latter types exclusively. Sometimes you’ll be in the same dilemma at your hobby shop or…
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The Two Fingered Salute…
Actually, that should be two-pronged, but I wanted to grasp your attention quickly with a slightly risqué title. I was going to add something about Mae West or Sabrina but the younger readers wouldn’t have any reference points… The business of painting bombers and transports is a little tougher than fighters. To start with, they…
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Martin Marauder – Part Four – The Slippery Olive
The Marauder had a strange reputation for quite some while but eventually setled down as a very capable ship in the European theatre. It also featured in several Pacific battles and guarded Alaska as well. I was tempted to attach a torpedo to this Marauder just to show that it had been done – and…
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Martin Marauder – Part Three – The Wobbly Line
A new experiment in painting – the demarcation line on the Martin Marauder is a wavy one – a particularity of the USAAF planes at the time. I am going to try to duplicate it by masking off a mean curved line with Tamiya tape and then developing the curves with masking fluid. See the heading…
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Martin Marauder B-26 – Part Two – Two Bit Model
A bit of a come-down from yesterday, but today I started the kit and discovered why Airfix had a bad reputation a decade ago. a. Two short shots. b. One missing part. c. An extra tailplane. d. More flash than a Marvel comic. I am not all that nonplussed, though I have be plussier…
The Little World
Close focus on the world of scale models
The Little World 