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I’m Not Fussy

Really I’m not. You would be convinced of this if you saw some of the clothes I wear and some of the people I pal around with. There is a lot of slack there, and most of it is me. And I am getting a lot looser with what I build as a scale modeller.…
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Sherman Tank – Part Five – Aberdeen

And not the one in Scotland, either. Aberdeen Proving Ground, Harford County, Maryland. The US Army testing facility. There’s another one at Dugway in Utah, but you don’t want to stand downwind of it… The Zvezda kit provided decals for the Aberdeen tank, so it got the nod. That meant that it could be very…
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Sherman Tank – Part Four – Aha, A Flaw!

And I did not think I would find one in this Zvezda kit. One of the mufflers is missing. The plastic stock box yielded a bit of Evergreen tube and its end was sealed with Milliput. Simple. Every other blessed part fit perfectly – and spending a day making the bogies was a real pleasure.…
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Sherman Tank – Part Three – Batch Processing

” Batch processing ” is the term we use in photography for editing one image perfectly, then commanding a computer program to make all the rest in the job the same. It saves an immense amount of post-processing time. ( Working with really lousy images is known as son of a batch processing…) It is…
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Sherman Tank – Part Two – A Different Market?

Am I seeing a kit made for a different market from the previous Zvezda tank? It was a Josef Stalin II and might have been more popular in Russia than in the west. This Sherman might be the other side of the coin. And the sophistication of the kit might reflect an expectation of more…
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Sherman Tank – Part One – The Shermanski

It felt distinctly odd to order this tank kit from BNA…considering that it is an American tank made by a Russian company depicting an item used by the Red Army. It was all lend-lease back then, and apparently the 2000-or so Shermans that were shipped to the USSR were liked by their crews, but the…
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It’s All About The Show

At the show, that is. This fatuous philosophy may make my model displays better in the future. I’ve just seen a wake-up that tells me the viewers need more than what many modellers give them. My library dioramas – 300mm x 820 mm – are kept to that size by the display cabinet that protects…
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Imagination Vs Reality

How much of either powers your scale modelling? In my own case, less of the former in individual models but a great deal of it in major dioramas. I invent air forces and their air fields as settings for soi disant accurate models. Self deception at its finest. What of the model car makers? I…
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The Race Track

These days it’s the only sort of race that’s safe to write about… The recent model car spectacular had a number of race tracks in operation – though the ones I photographed were static. Still, if one wants action, there are slot car tracks still in operation, as well as R/C racing venues. I was…
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Model Car Spectacular 2023

I learned a lot yesterday when I attended a model car show. I probably knew it beforehand, but my mind had not bothered to assemble the various facts. Now I can look at the photo results and do some thinking. Firstly, let me say the clubs that did the exhibition worked all-out to make a…
