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Boeing B-17G – Part One – Academy

Or is that Minicraft? The box for this old B-17 lists both companies and a recent announcement from Academy in South Korea says that the assets of this older American company have been acquired by them. This box looks to be slightly old and slightly squashed and the instructions date the Academy sheet at 1992.…
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Modelling Without Guilt

It’s rather like sex without guilt – fun, but a little bland. Not that you want to be pursued through bedroom doors and corridors like a Feydeau farce, but a little innocent concealment of the new kit makes for a frisson of excitement – even if it turns out to be the same old moulding…
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Limited-Run Kit

Limited by many factors: a. How many copies we can pull out of a mould that is basically made of hardened bread dough. b. Whether we can persuade people to buy a kit with three pieces of plastic and six sheets of brass promises. c. Whether anyone wants a model of a 1936 test-bed that…
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Where Is Your Thunder?

Did someone steal it? Did you give it away, again? Did you look into a modelling magazine or go to a website and find someone has beat you to the punch with their rendition of a scale model kit? Is the Framley-Hopkins ” Regurgitator ” biplane in your stash now just ashes in the box?…
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What To Do When You Can’t Get It

Relax, lady. This is about scale modelling – not sex. What do we do when the scale model magazine shows a wonderful new range of after-market parts to detail a kit and everyone else in the world can get it except us? Stuck on the edge of the Indian Ocean way out past where the…
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How Far Down Do The Rabbits Go?

And I don’t mean on the internet. How far down does a scale modeller pursue the business – at what point does the quest for detail stop? How about weathering and appearance? Where does the line of diminishing returns cross that of fatigue? I think it differs with the genre and scale of the models,…
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MiG 15 Bis – Part Five – Between The Wars

Actually you have to be a lot more specific with the Middle East – which two?. Their wars arrive in succession like buses at Bull Creek railway station – one after another. This colour scheme is said to be late 60’s – somewhere in between the Sinai War and the 6-Day War. I have googled…
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MiG 15 Bis – Part Four – Short John Silver

Been waiting for years to use that line… The choice of the United Arab Republic’s Air Force as the scheme for this MiG 15 Bis was driven by the need to have some counterbalance to my Israeli Air Force collection. The time selected by Eduard for their decals is the early 1960’s – after the…
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MiG 15 Bis – Part Three – Tight And Dry

A good thing in scale model kits and row boats. Not as desirable in schoolteachers or bank managers. This Eduard kit has classic tab-and-slot fitting for the wings and peg-in-hole for the tailplanes. In both cases the fit eas very firm – so much so that a little sanding was needed to get the parts…
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MiG 15 Bis – Part Two – The Profi Parts

Well, you could avoid them, but then you’d be wasting your three dollars. I mean the business of using the Profi-Pack parts for an Eduard kit. The difference between the Weekend Edition and the Profi-Pack seems to be masking, decal choice, and a PE brass fret. The kit makers do provide plastic parts as alternative…
