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McDonnell Banshee – Part Four – Ready For The Canadian Hall, Eh?
The decals have gone on the RCN Banshee and it is ready for the display hall of Canadian service aircraft. The suspect upper grey is still on it and sealed in with varnish. I am actually delighted with the thing – and it is rather a massive fighter compared with some of the Korean War…
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McDonnell Banshee – Part Three – The Paint Call-Out
At a certain point in the construction of the McDonnell Banshee in Royal Canadian Navy livery I needed to consider the paints required. I took to the Academy instruction shoot and looked at their colour call-out chart. It confirmed what I already knew from looking at internet pictures of the plane ( I had never…
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McDonnell Banshee – Part Two – The Body On The Rack
My new building rack was ready when I was working on the fuselage of the Banshee. The heading image shows the bare thing taped down to the rack with cheap masking tape. Note that I have standardised upon the Bear brand painter’s tape from Bunnings for most non-critical tape jobs They do a very low-tack…
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McDonnell Banshee – Part One – The Holiday Kit
On my holidays to Melbourne, I slipped into the new Metro Models shop in Bourke Street to see what I could find. This Academy model of the McDonnell F2H-3 Banshee did not call to me at first until I turned up the side of the box and was staring at three colour profiles of Royal…
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Douglas Devastator – Part Three – Did I Get My Money’s Worth?
That’s always a pertinent question as far as my hobbies go. Indeed it also applies to clothing purchases, dinners at restaurants, and holiday trips. Sometimes the answer is no – for instance when they bring a tiny dinner out on a vast white plate and then hover like a Sikorski asking whether it is to…
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Good Morning, Walter – Part 14 – None Of These Toys Work…
Walter, here’s a selection of pictures from a recent Toy and Doll Collector’s fair here in Perth. I went to my regular exhibition hall on the day to see if there were going to be any scale model airplane kits that I wanted to buy. Short answer – no. That’s not the sort of thing…
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Douglas Devastator – Part Two – Crates
” My God, Carruthers! They’re sending boys up in crates like those…” Well, don’t write off the Douglas Devastator TBD so soon. Admittedly they did not have sterling success as fighting machines in the battles they fought…but they did get some torpedo strikes. If the US Navy had addressed the problems of the Mk XIII…
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Douglas Devastator – Part One – I Was Devastated
Well, not actually devastated…which apparently means ruined with overwhelming shock and grief. More like surprised and delighted, in a geeky way. Someone was selling old dead plastic model kits for tiny prices. It was not even the swap-meet portion of the Victorian plastic model show – just a few table-holders who decided to get in…
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When To Reach For The Pointed Stick – Part Five – The Primitives
Painting and masking need not always be done with conventional tools. Spray cans, spray guns, airbrushes and bristle brushes are all very well, but we can take a lesson from the indigenous Australians who had none of these tools. For millenia they picked up a pointed stick and cheerfully painted away. In many cases they…
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When To Reach For The Can – Part Four – Rattle me Timbers, Matey…
The aerosol paint can for model work has been around nearly as long as I have, though I did not come to them as a resource until I was in my teens. The cans were small then, as they are now, and just as expensive in relative terms. An AMT model car might cost $…
The Little World
Close focus on the world of scale models
