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Decal Or Paint?

Not a difficult choice when the design is complicated. Also not a tough decision when the decal sheet has something exactly as needed. There are any number of decal setting solutions today that will let you drape a design over a wet porcupine, so just take your time. When it comes to bigger scales and…
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Welcome To The Club

You don’t need to fill out an application form – just sitting there with cement on your fingers and tears streaming down your face is enough. You’re one of us. Now peel that ruined canopy off your jumper and tell us why you decided to do this to yourself. You had a chance to escape.…
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Grumman Albatross – Part Three – Before 1965

If you look closely at some of my RCAF aircraft, they look odd; there is no lightning flash down the sides and the the flag is wrong. Wrong. The planes are pre-1965 with the old national flag on the tail. And if you look closely you’ll see that it flies with the Union Jack to…
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Grumman Albatross – Part Two – Shipmates Stand Together

Don’t give up the ship. Or the kit, for that matter. My first club morning with this kit went very well - the dry parts fit was excellent for a period piece and I was ready to work on the interior by the time I left for home. I did paint the inside and started to…
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Grumman Albatross – Part One – Rescued From The Past

At last – my chance to do a classic Monogram kit that I never built before. Whatever the flaws there may be in this old kit – the raised rivets, etc, it has the priceless advantage of being part of plastic history. There will be movable landing gear, and I shall not hesitate to make…
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Morality And Styrene Cement

A guide to repentance and the re-enforced joint. As scale modelling sinners we often risk judgement and damnation through our treatment of the innocent…the innocent kit, I mean. Each one of these comes to us pristine and unsullied, unless it has been bought at a stash sale – and in that case anything that happens…
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Do We Read Or Watch?

A good question for scale modellers. We used to have books and magazines to inform our modelling. Increasingly we turn to screens…sometimes to read, as you are doing now…but sometimes to watch an unknown person tell us how to do something or what to think about some subject. The video proceeds at its own pace…
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Minimalist Modelling

Paint everything white. Corbusier Kits: sheets of foamcore board and you just glue them together in slabs. I have been experimenting with a less complex approach to scale model building these last few months. Not that kit building can ever be truly simple…or for that matter neither can Lego or Meccano work. Doll houses are…
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The Kit That Makes You Say Hmmm

We have all had one…and those of us with bad luck have had several kits that make us doubt whether we should have even started them. Sometimes it has been commenced in a hurry with blithe disregard to warnings from the internet. Sometimes we have been seduced by box art. Plastic porn, if you will.…
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Supermarine Swift FR.5 – Part Five – NATO Eye

Call me suspicious and cynical if you wish – I mean a person like you would…but I suspect that the ranks of photo reconnaissance aircraft are generally made up of fighter failures. They are either not fast enough, nimble enough, or well-enough armed to succeed on the battlefield, and are relegated to flying above it…
