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The image doesn't display, and when I click on it I am given a warning that the host website is unsafe and should be avoided. Lee

Well done for kicking the job in the arm. If you can look after your mother and enjoy your hobby at the same time, then great. Good luck to you mate. Cared for my late wife through two bouts of cancer and now with my new lady, the last year also. It's not been easy but I have good friends. True friends are hard to find and keep, so if you have some treasure them! Colin

Miss a double entendre opportunity, never... 😉

Yikes! I'm not a car guy, but that's too beautiful to ignore. Great work!

How about actually saying "Great model but little else" in a PM, rather than a posting everyone else has to scroll past?

Apologies not sure why it won’t work.

She is looking good John, keep up the great work. Simon.

You did a fine job with the brush painting for the squiggle/dot camo scheme on this aircraft. Really nice looking 88. Thanks for sharing.

Are they out of hours or is a possible sale available as an option. New Zealand, Ireland etc? Yes I know, talking bo looks! Good canvas for the wif brigade. Keith

Thanks Steve. Yes the HK500 is my favourite of the lot: the Excellence had a reputation for bending in the middle when both doors were opened. IIRC Ava Gardner had one. Many thanks: the chromed kit parts are a bit too 'bright' for me so I sanded them smooth and Bare Metal Foiled them. Hopefully it works a bit better. I made the FV II many years ago and it's due a re-paint: the HK500 is quite a rare kit nowadays and as with the Excellence, it needed a new screen - front and rear in the case of the Excellence; just the front on the HK500 kit (which has crystal clear screens (strange), but a big crack in the front screen). Luckily it would appear that the Excellence and HK500 front screens are the same, so the mould I made has already done its magic for the second kit. I've seen a few HK500s and FV IIs in recent years but never an Excellence: there's a car museum on the Isle of Man that has three!

Being ex Royal Navy, a good bottle of Pusser's Rum, Gunpowder Blend. Alternatively a good bottle o Riojas, failing that a good South African Pinotage. However, food wise, black pudding, I'm from the north of England, so no apologies. Pork pies , Lancashire Hot Pot. Tripe as my grandmother used to prepare it and rice pudding. Ten, in the Navy we had Babies heads. Suet pastry mounded in a small tin, filled with delicious steak and kidney, then steamed in a boiler. The meat, pink inside and hence the name, babied heads. If you ae from the north west, then Hollands made them. I'm a foody, so good food is always good. Colin

I know. I found it amusing that a modern model should be criticised for removing features, when those same features had been so disliked for being present 50 years or more ago.

Nice job! And the Heyford is one of the reasons that, in my not-so-humble opinion, Matchbox was a great company. Who else thought of kitting one of those? And the Vickers Wellesley? Twin Otter? Skyservant? 2-seat Hunter? I could go on, but they had subjects that everyone else ignored in their rush to produce yet another Bf-109 with, finally!, an accurate radio tuning knob. I miss them. Had they survived, I may have been able to get my Hindustan HF-24. It's the sort of thing they wouldn't have shied away from.

April 20th & 21st The clear Friday night developed into a clear, calm and dry weekend, so it was time to get back to the wall. I've built walls before at the Washington house. Made from modern metric bricks, they turned out so neat, that some people thought the pictures were CGI of what I planned to build. This wall isn't like that at all. The bricks are Victorian, dating from around 1860, appear hand made. Some are huge, around four and a half to five inches wide in places and none are exactly the same size, nor have flat faces. Some are bulged, some are con-caved, the ends aren't necessarily square and the proportions aren't right for the length of one brick, to work with the width of two bricks for the pillar. All of this is made laying them a real challenge. Straight and level needs to be an average, as a small level won't sit flat on any of the bricks! Several bricks broke or crumbled during dismantling of the wall, so multiple half bricks were used on the far side, below ground level. They are all being reused from the original wall, so all are stained from age or lime mortar. I may try cleaning them once the wall is finished. By the end of Saturday, I had four courses added on the front and two on the back. My back really didn't want me to go back out on Sunday, but I couldn't waste another good weather day. Another two courses were added to the front, with four at the back, though every fourth layer has the bricks laid across the wall, to tie the two sides together. It was all covered in plastic by the end of the day, as the rain came back that evening and has continued on and off to today. Lynne also gave the lawn its first cut of the year. It was still a bit wet, but had got so long, it took her two hours. I'm hoping a rotary wire brush or grinder can clean off the bricks a bit. A quick test seemed to suggest that would work, but they've got 150 years of weathering to catch up on to match the rest of the wall - which also needs pointing. Yet another job!

I thought everyone had missed that

I expect you can get an ointment for that....

April 19th Funny how life is circular. When the old Victorian school was knocked down in 1969, to make way for our house, the site was around one acre, with the bungalow only taking up a small part of that plot. The rest of the land was used as a plant nursery. Here we are in 2024, with plant production now going into industrial levels to fill the garden. We've multiple seed trays on the go, which have started to come to life in the last week. Having already spent around £200 on plants for the railway and path, I'm now looking for a cheaper source to fill in gaps. The postman also brought another box of twelve Purple Rock Cress plants. Right now, they are tiny, but they will go along the edge of the railway to complete a solid line of these plants as a barrier between the ballast and embankment. With night time frosts still possible, I've potted them for now, until we can be sure the frosts are behind us. Lynne was fretting a couple of nights ago, that we might loose £200 of plants to a late frost! In the picture below, I've got three pots of Forget-me-nots, pulled from the lawn and the grass separated from them. To their right, in the Flash box, are three pots of wildflower seeds. I think the seeds are tiny, so the box has a white powder mixed in to help to show where they've been spread. With it being still cold outside, I planted some in pots, kept indoors, to see if anything would emerge from the powder mix! The remaining two pictures are Candy Tuft seedlings, which were big enough to separate from the seed trays and plant in their own pots. The Slushy pots, complete with lids, make quite nice mini greenhouses which also helps to keep the moisture in. The open top still allows fresh CO2 in, for the leaves to breathe. I'm interested to know if those with lids grow faster or slower than the others.

I think he's referring to this chap:

Thank you all for your kind comments!

He's not wrong you know

Going to lunch today and this was there. Not my favorite.

That looks like the swollen rim, yes 😐

Well done. Alain

That's good to know. I doubt I'll be using A-Stand unless I get some in for review, as I've got tons of other brands knocking about, but you never know

It's a good excuse Seriously though, it's one of these things that happens. If you're lucky enough to have your device last long beyond its support date, you find that the developers stop updating your browser, and eventually you start noticing that things aren't working as well as they used to. You could try another browser other than Safari, or whichever one you're currently using. Historically, Firefox and a few others have supported older devices for longer, but they're all based upon Apple code called Webkit, and once that's out of date, most browsers will behave in a similar screwy manner. @Enzo the Magnificent's problem was user generated, although we don't know which of the staff accidentally moved all his files, but I found them for him It was just a coincidence that it happened at around the same time as the update. Typical, eh?