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The Arrogant Strut

Those who saw Mussolini were impressed with the way he strutted. Likewise with Al Jolson and Kaiser Wilhelm II. However, none of them were as arrogant as the Airfix company when it comes to strutting…as witnessed by their production of a 1:72 Bristol F.2B. They have produced a kit that is nearly impossible to assemble.…
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No, I’m The King

You have to be Princess. It’s my game and I write the rules. I think I have discovered where the concept of scale model exhibition committees was developed. Sort of like a Dungeons And Dragons game where reading the rules takes up most of the evening and eventually you just want a drink. Perhaps there…
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Trying To Get That Exclusive Prototype

And hoping that it is one that everyone secretly always wanted to build. This can be the only explanation for a number of short-run kits that flow out of Eastern Europe. There can be only a few individuals on the planet that dream of building failed designs that are both ugly and insignificant. Even driven…
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Is Your Rainbow Biased?

Relax. Not going all political on you here. But do you have better results with certain colours? Not certain paints – that’s a different debate – I mean a certain hue within the paint range you use. I rarely paint dark sea blue or coal black, but when I do, it is nearly always a…
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Sukhoi Su-22 Fitter – Part Three – Up and Flying

The 1/144 scale model is a wonderful thing – but you have to remember that it is an abstract of a thumbnail sketch of a miniature painted on ivory. The average person will not be able to rig the hydraulic hoses in the wheel wells. The person who can do this is watched carefully by…
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Sukhoi Su-22 Fitter – Part Two – The Pied Piper Of Budapest

More than one premiere for this little kit. I was puzzled at the box art for this ground-attack aircraft – The markings seemed to show a bomb strike on a highway amongst green fields – yet the plane was possibly a Middle Eastern one. My silly – it turns out to be a Hungarian aircraft…
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Sukhoi Su-22 Fitter – Part One – First Of The Fifty Cent Series.

First cab off the rank is the Academy Sukhoi Su-22 Fitter. The tiny box contains three tiny sprue trees – two in hard grey plastic and one clear. There is no flash whatsoever and no sinkholes are evident. Surprisingly, there is room in the cockpit for a separate seat and instrument panel. The canopy is…
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Little Christmas World

Not every Little World has fighter planes and tanks – some are dedicated to far more peaceful pursuits. Take for instance the annual Christmas layout a friend and her daughter construct – I should have written daughters, as there are three, but two are now residing elsewhere and I think the constructors are down to…
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The Tsunami

It started as a fountain of knowledge – then a pool of information – then a flood of images. Now we have a tsunami and modellers are being drowned at their workbenches. I mean the internet, and specifically the Google images page. The go-to when you are looking for either inspiration or confirmation. You want…
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If You Don’t Want To Have A Good Time…

Tell us now – we’ve got kits that we’ve been saving for just such an occasion… As a kid, I saw kits in shops that I knew were a mistake. The shop might have been a hardware store in a Canadian bush town, a news agency in an Australian country town, or the leftovers in…
