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Standin’ On The Tarmac – Part Four – The Colour Switch

Throwing the colour switch in tabletop photography is a debatable point. Fortunately it is a question that need not be attended to as assiduously in the digital era as it would have been with film. We do not need to fuss with lamps and filters quite so much as before – it can indeed be…
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Standin’ On The Tarmac – Part Three – The Standard Lens

Laugh all you like at the use of the word ” standard “. There are no end of standards in the world for all sorts of things and few people agree on what they should be. But you can put the technical definitions side and just note what cameras were equipped with in the 1940’s…
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Standin’ On The Tarmac – Part Two – The Lowdown

How tall are you? If you can smoke cigars, drink whiskey, and join the army, you are likely to be about 1.5-1.8 metres tall, with your eyes some 120 mm lower down than the top of your head. I realise there are people outside the average and I salute them, but let’s take an example…
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Standin’ On The Tarmac – Part One – The Wrong Stuff

Watchin’ all the birds roll by…dum de dum dum. Should put that to music – might make a good pop song. Standin’ on a scale model tarmac, runway, racetrack, street, or hardstand is the subject of this series of essays. If you are repulsed by mathematics, just look at the pretty pictures. The Little Studio…
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Faith and Begorrah…

” Tis a green jig. It must be Irish. ” Well, ’tis green now but it’s about to become feldgrau and then olive drab, and then azure blue in patches. And then you can assign whatever nationality you want to it. It’s Mk III painting jig – the foamboard structure upon which I hang the…
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The Play Set

I just figured out why I like my model airfields so much. They are the best play set I’ve ever had. The Louis Marx company play sets that appeared in so many North American Christmas catalogues in the 50’s were wonderful things. You could get Fort Apache, The Alamo, The Army Camp, Cape Canaveral, Cops and…
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The Mini – Wagner…Or How To Make An Atomic Mess

Some people outside of Australia may not know the Wagner spray guns and rollers. They are devices sold in DIY shops that are intended to make house painting easier. The TITANIC was a boat intended to make ocean travel safe… Wagners do work. I painted the inside of a house with one about 40 years…
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The New Direction Is Direction-finding

Idly surfing the net recently I noted that the RCAF station that I have taken as my inspiration was, for quite some time, a radar early warning facility as well as a training air base. This continued right through the period of time that my model layout depicts. I couldn’t resist the temptation to use…
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Piasecki Flying Banana – Part Four – I Love it…

I love it when a plan comes together – and equally when a collection of sub-assemblies can be piled into each other to yield a finished product. The last day building on a project is always a surprise. For some people it slows down – like a video of dogs catching frisbees – and for…
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Piasecki Flying Banana – Part Three – The Jesus Nut

My friend Warren tells me Air Force facts and trivia gleaned from his years of service. One of the latest bits is the slang term for the nut that finally secures a helicopter’s rotor to the vertical shaft that drives it – the Jesus Nut. If it fails you go to… Well, joking aside, I…
