Tag: Aichi
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Aichi Grace – Part Three – There, But For The Grace Of Aichi…

Goes a wonderful dive bomber… Pardon the punning. It has been a good week in the Little Workshop with the completion of the Fujimi Aichi Grace. The experiment of serial building seems to be paying off. The Fujimi kit has also proved to be better than some of their previous offerings – based upon the…
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Aichi Grace – Part Two – Report On The Experiment

You can experiment with all sorts of things; materials, processes, ideas, and weird food. The last-named aside, the others are often a help in scale modelling. We get set in our ways and sometimes it is in Carbonite like Han Solo. We need to explore new things. For a couple of years I followed the…
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Aichi B7A2 Grace – Part One – Plastic Baggies Have Changed…

Remember the 50¢ Airfix baggie of 1959? Your whole allowance gone but you could build on it for a week. This Fujimi kit has also come to me in a plastic bag, courtesy of a stash sale, but it is considerably in advance of the ’59 kits. It’s come at the price of pint of…
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Aichi Seiran – Part Four – Underwater Bomber

I puzzled a bit at the Tamiya box for this float-plane. No Allied code-name. Normally they give that to let people know what it was called – but this one wasn’t called anything…I suspect the Allies never saw one flying. It was meant to be an attack bomber carried by a very large submarine –…
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Aichi Seiran – Part Two – The Trolley

This is quite the most detailed trolley I have ever seen. Seaplanes and float-planes are wonderful birds in the air and slippery fish on the surface of the water, but sad encumbrances back at the air base. Unless they are amphibians like the USAF Albatross, they cannot land on their own wheels and need something…
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Aichi Seiran – Part One – A Bargain

And a Tamiya bargain at that – you don’t see many of those around the shops these days! I cannot say whether this Aichi Seiran float plane model was inexpensive because it was unpopular, or unpopular because it was an old kit, or an old kit because it was inexpensive…that sort of circular logic is…
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Aichi Val – Part Four – Pearl Harbour

As problematical as this model has been to build, it is still welcome into the collection as the final piece in the set for the USS ARIZONA diorama photo shoot. This is the reason it doesn’t have stationery propeller blades – it will be photographed diving on the battleship from the port quarter. Doing this…
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Aichi Val – Part Three – Stripe Tail

I have often remarked the stripes that appear on the horizontal stabilisers of WW2 Japanese aircraft. They are on the upper side and form a fan radiating outwards from the front of the vertical stabiliser – some tails have them in white – some in yellow. This Aichi Val tail has them in red. They…
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Aichi Val – Part Two – Not Quite Tamiya

I was a bit premature in my assessment of the Fujimi kit of the Aichi Type 11. It is closer to Monogram than Tamiya. The flash encountered was not too bad – nothing that knifing and sanding could not deal with. The location pins were in the right places. Yet the fuselage halves fit only…
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Airfix Vintage Val – Part Two – So Far, So Good

The last couple of plague days were very productive – and the Airfix Aichi Val was coming along splendidly. Fuselage seams needed progressive assembly but in the end little filler would be needed – so little that it would probably be only thickened undercoat. So far a victory over the Fujimi product. Wings needed no…
