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Messerschmitt 109 – Part Three – Suspicions…
I am not a naturally suspicious man, as anyone who has seen me in the police lineups will attest. I am ready to take anyone at face value…as long as I can pronounce them guilty. This benign attitude even extends to looking at pictures of fighter planes and trying to figure out their colour schemes.…
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Messerschmitt 109 – Part Two – Modelers Sushi
If that seems like a funny way to think of a kit, consider that the Hobby Boss products are sometimes served on plastic trays within the external box – rather like the tasty Japanese food that we get from shopping centres. The kit is just as well presented – all that is missing is the…
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Messerschmitt 109 – Part One – Never Let A Chance Go By…
I am indebted to a friend, Paul, for that bit of philosophy. He’s another modeller/collector/builder type and makes regular visits to hobby shops and toy stores wherever he goes. And he has the modeller’s eye that sees viable scale building materials in completely unlikely products. In my case it was a visit to a store…
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The Bad Decision
Steel yourself – there will be some serious soul-searching in this post. You are going to have to confront your own failures. As for me, I’m going to hide mine by pretending that I never make mistakes. Anything that goes wrong is someone else’s fault – even if there is no-one within 500 yds of…
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Repressed Desires And the Scale Modeller
I have come to this topic from writing another column dedicated to selling photographic goods. It occurred to me that if there is an id in the camera shop, there is also likely to be one in the hobby shop. I turned over the thought that Sigmund Freud might have been a model train buff,…
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The 2018 Catalogue
I have just been doing my extensive professional research…that’s code for surfing the internet…and studied the 2018 catalogue for a firm that makes model trains. They are a historic firm that entered into the plastic toy trade at least 50 years ago from a long association with the tinware business. I had the privilege of…
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Hawker Hurricane Mk II – Part Five – The Newfie
Those of you from the Dominion of Canada will know I speak with affection about Newfoundland – The place where this Hawker Hurricane was based. Specifically at Torbay in 1943 when German U boats were feared. They had successfully sunk ships nearby in the previous year and the RCAF needed to have a quick-response answer.…
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Hawker Hurricane Mk II – Part Four – The Next Grievous Error
Well, I added one today. The next foolish error. The one that separates the men from the boys. And I know which side I’m on… I had masked the new Hawker Hurricane Mk II very well and I was ready to shoot the upper works. As it was a cold day. I selected lacquer thinner…
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Hawker Hurricane Mk II – Part Three – The Beauty Salon
It was cold tonight. Rainy. I adjourned into the computer room with a portable modelling tray to proceed with the Hurricane in some comfort – the Little Workshop was just too miserable to work in, even with the heater on. The task was masking the pattern illustrated in the Avia publication on Canadian warplanes. I…
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Hawker Hurricane Mk II – Part Two – Ahhhhh, Chooo!
Oops. Sniff. Looks like it is all together…. Well, it almost seems like that with Hobby Boss. You sit there idly scraping down a seam line…that is nearly perfect anyway…and then you dry fit a couple of parts and then you decide to glue one in… And the thing is done. It’s not quite that…
The Little World
Close focus on the world of scale models
The Little World 