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Fairey Firefly Mk V – Part Four – Preserved Fly
According to Skaarup, these Firefly aircraft flew with the Royal Canadian Navy from 1946 to 1952 – roughly about the same time they served with the Royal Australian Navy. The carriers they flew from were Royal Navy donations to the Commonwealth countries – the MAJESTIC, BONAVENTURE, SYDNEY, AND MELBOURNE. The decks were perfectly suited to…
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Fairey Firefly Mk V – Part Three – 60’s Airfix
But not the Bad sixties. This kit fit pretty well – if you remembered to trim round the fuselage locating pins and square off the wing attachments. Only two small sink marks and the centre seam almost good. Not a major filling exercise. The exhaust stacks are glorious but need to be put in before…
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Fairey Firefly Mk V – Part Two – Stub Wings
The first day of work on a new kit can be either basic cockpit or even more basic part sanding. Imagine my surprise when I got through a club meeting with the stub wings joined to the fuselage.The Airfix engineering has large mating surfaces for the wing roots onto the fuselage so you can proceed…
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Fairey Firefly MkV – Part One – Double Sealed
When I bought this Airfix kit at the swap meet it was tightly sealed in a factory plastic wrap. Once inside I found it was sealed again with side-stickers. No-one who had not purchased this plane was going to get in there! The plastic bag that held the parts was open, but nothing escaped. The…
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Play Nice
Which is not the sort of thing you hear at many modelling contests. Wherever there is a judge, there will be a judgement. I suspect that in some cases the modeller is also treated like a suspect, and eventually there will be a sentencing. Watch me in the future and see if they make me…
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The Half-Built Bargain
However you acquire a half-built – stash sale, donation, or legacy – you buy more than a box. You buy a dilemma. A fresh kit, with a sealed box or bagged sprue trees, is a clean field to play on. It may be old, with tatty decals and useless instructions, but at least when you…
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The Courage To Play
Do you remember playing? If you can recall your childhood and still picture the games and toys that amused you…you are a very lucky person. Even if they were modest things, they helped you to understand the world and prepare to be an active part of it. You grew older – hopefully wiser. You l…
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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…
The Little World
Close focus on the world of scale models
The Little World 