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Selling The Unsaleable

The heart of a hobby shop owner must be made of leather and whipcord. Or marzipan. Either way, it needs to be tough and resilient. The ultimate test of this comes at the end of the day when the last customer leaves and the till is totalled up. If the last customer is the only…
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Bristol F.2B – Part Three – Warts And All

A rare week – it is not often that I build two models in one week – in parallel – of the same plane. I have no regrets. The seams and pins of the old Airfix kit yielded eventually to Sprue Goo and the the wretched struts were eventually cemented home in roughly the right…
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Bristol F.2B – Part Two – Struttin’ Wif’ Some Styrene

And I had much rather it had been wif’ some barbecue… The point at which you regret your choices in life occurs to all of us, but it comes repeatedly to the scale modeller who builds biplanes. The original designers of the aircraft were forced to use multiple wings and sticks and wire between them…
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Bristol F.2B – Part One – The Dogfight Half

Bitterly disappointed as I was upon opening the Airfix box, I decided to soldier on. I had been expecting a Fokker triplane as well as a Bristol F.2b that were shown on the box top. Inside the box were decals for both planes, instructions and call-out for both, but no Fokker. Instead I got a…
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PZL – The Karas Yet Again

You might have to avoid me on the street – I seem to have become slightly fixated with this old Heller kit. I may start babbling… At least I am logical maniac. I do not subscribe to conspiracy theories – I recognise the randomly idiotic nature of the world and do not attribute any of…
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And Yet…Here We Are…

As a kid and teenager I took a serious interest in scale models – and was increasingly scorned for it as years went by. The climate of the country changed – people expected more serious behaviour – there was nothing cool about pursuing something that a child could do. I was expected to grow up,…
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Radio Controlled Daily Driver?

Are all R/C cars racers? Or 4WD buggies? Has no-one got the ambition to drive a scale model Toyota Camry to a scale model shopping centre and spend a half hour trying to back it into a parking space? I was brought to this when visiting the doctor recently. In the car park was a…
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Buy All The Superglue

And discover whether it really is super or not… I have looked with nuclear puzzlement at the cyanoacrylate cement racks in the hobby shop…as well as at the DIY shop. Frequently no idea at all forms in my mind, and I buy whatever is cheapest. The super-thin sort goes everywhere and into my fingers. The…
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Pursuing The Wild Hare

Fine, if it involves chasing one over a meadow. Not so good if it becomes anatomical. Sometimes people come to you with schemes. The ones that involve remaking the world in a medieval mould can be interesting, but you have to ask who is going to be the lord and who the serf. It makes…

