Tag: Hobby Boss
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Northrop P-61 Black Widow – Part One – My Second Widow

Ninth grade – Christmas in Calgary, Alberta. The tree held a number of real surprises…a Guillows SE5A and and Aurora 1:48 Northrop Black WIdow amongst others. It was the first time I had ever seen the aircraft and I was astounded. The Aurora kits were fun for their time but their time was a long…
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Grumman Wildcat – Part Two – Four-Part Harmony

In each of the two pictures on this post there are four plastic parts. They’re glued up and setting overnight. The time taken to get to this point, including the washing of the parts, was about one hour. I’ve spent longer in the barbers. This would be a terrible thing for some modellers to contemplate.…
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Grumman Wildcat – Part One – Hello Yellow

My friend Warren once pulled up a Hobby Boss kit of the F4F Wildcat in early colours and it set me investigating. This plane turned up in one of the profiles out of a modelling magazine – I can’t tell you if the kit makers made theirs from the illustration or if the illustrator drew…
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Dewoitine D.520 – Part One – Allo, Allo…

I have passed the Hobby Boss Dewoitine D-520 kit on the hobby shop shelves for a couple of years now with no regrets. I’d built a Morane Saulnier and a Caudron and the prospect of an diminutive French plane was no urgent call. But I’ve recently borrowed one of those profile books of WW2 fighters…
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Grumman F9F-2 Panther – Part Five – A Political Panther

Well, political in the sense that everything military in South America is political. From the smallest rubber truncheon to the GENERAL BELGRANO, every weapon is eventually turned against the local citizens, the neighbours, or the other armed forces. It is a tradition that probably started in the Inca and Aztec days, got noisier with the…
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Grumman F9F-2 Panther – Part Four – The Simoom

Or is that sirocco? Whichever, it is the hot dry wind that blows nobody any good, and it blew into my workshop the other day. Had I been smart, I would have closed the flaming door… The day was hot, but not the spectacular heat that drives people into air conditioning and makes the newspaper…
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Grumman F9F-2 Panther – Part Three – You Only Forget Once

Putting together a model of a jet airplane is pretty straightforward in comparison to a biplane or a WWII bomber. Fewer parts, no propellors, and usually a much sturdier undercarriage. But there is one thing that most modern jets have in common – tricycle landing gear and a tendency to sit on their tails. The…
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Grumman F9F-2 Panther – Part Two – Tubby Little Devil

The cockpit assembly of the Panther has just been completed and I must say it’s pretty nice for a $ 20 model. 5-piece, and some fine moulding on the sidewalls and instrument panel. And for a change the panel decal actually fit the piece. Micro-Sol doesn’t hurt either. The interior of the fuselage is…
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Grumman F9F-2 Panther – Part One – The Cheap Cat

I have long admitted a weakness for bargain model kits. You have only to show me a shelf full of the expensive ones with a cheap runt at the end and you know which one I’ll take. In the case of the Hobby Boss F9F-2 Panther it was sitting next to a similar kit in…
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Hawker Sea Hawk – Part One – Memories of the 60’s

A casual post on the internet alerted me that my favourite go-to model company had released a 1:72 version of one of my favourite models of the 1960’s: the Hawker Sea Hawk. And this one from Hobby Boss was reported to be more than just a quick-build kid’s kit. Be that as it may, I…
