Pritch

Just a thought. Has anyone considered the possibility of replacing the wings with a pair off an Airfix Vampire. Or a Classic Airframes two-seat Vampire, or even an Alley Cat Vampire? Even just grafting the two-seater front fuselage and tail on to (eg) an Airfix kit? I have all three, and maybe I could sacrifice one.

No, it's not picking nits, it's just being observant. The size of the lettering is right but the kerning between the last two numerals was wrong. To me it looked like it had been monospaced.

No luck trying to watch it -- just a technical equivalent of "Eff off". Same as I get for any attempt to find some method of watching Antiques Roadshow (which used to be very popular on TV, and then just disappeared). I hate to say it, but the UK is showing signs of becoming rather insular.

Falcon are definitely still in business, and do many for other manufacturers, but their website could probably do with a bit of updating. Look on the Hannants site (under 'Falcon'), and there are three new 1/72 and three new 1/32 canopies recently added. I have one for Hasegawa's 1/32 P-40.

Yoda speaks in 'periodic' sentences (look it up in Wikipedia). It's how Latin is written, and got drummed into me when I learned Latin in high school.

You might get some tips here: https://falconmodels.co.nz/howto.html

I think the decals sheet that would suit you would be Ventura V4898 (8 inch serials, British 1920-1939( http://venturapublications.com/store/index.php?main_page=advanced_search_result&search_in_description=1&keyword=v4898 This sheet has black with white outline in a number of styles, measuring out to 4.2 mm high -- which is 8 inch in 48th scale (32nd scale would be 5.6 mm)

Falcon (Clearvax) and Squadron canopies are still available. The possibly-not-quite-up-to-date website is www.falconmodels.co.nz. In the UK get them from Hannants; in the US get them from Squadron.

Am I imagining things, or did the Eduard 1/48 Fokker E.V / D.VIII come with two wings, one for fresh plywood and one saggy?

You sometimes have wonder what decal artists have available to them to work from. Probably just one side-view photo for the RNZAF trainer in the case of IcraCast, because their diagram shows the wing roundels on backwards. However, at least the IcraCast kiwi is accurate, while the Caracal kiwi looks more like a red turkey (although the placement diagram is correct).

Hendie Before you get too far into printing the tail surfaces, I think you should have a look at a walk-around of the real thing: https://jamesfahey.smugmug.com/Avro-504K/ I can't see any "nails" (or rib stitching), and in fact I can't even really make out the rib tapes. Tony

The Alpha Flight Sunderland is not without its problems. Bad casting, some warping, some broken parts -- all can be fixed, but the wrongly spaced portholes would be difficult to put right. Plus it's a Mk.III, not the Mk.V that I want. I got one many years ago, before the price of postage made getting large kits from overseas impossible, and I'll finish it one day. For some reason it does include a Mk.V nose turret. The Sanger kit is both Mk.III and Mk.V, but would be a lot of hard work and is not really a consideration because of shipping costs.

I agree, gingerbob, it would be possible to do some improvements, given a photo to copy, but the size -- who's right, Airfix or everyone else? And thanks for the link, 224 Peter. The one photo with a glimpse of the seat shows that it's a brown resin one. The grey IP is interesting, and I suspect there are some Canadian modifications going on here. One other thing is that the control column grip is a non-circular one like in the Airfix kit. Pity the links on that page seem to have suffered from link rot. In all the photos I've seen, what stands out is how cluttered the cockpit is, and how simplified the Airfix is. Probably doesn't matter much though because you can't see much in a black 50s cockpit.

BNA ModelWorld in Melbourne, Australia --- but it looks like I might have got the last one there. Sorry. ☹️

I'm impressed. With the addition of seatbelts, that wouldn't look too shabby. And it comes with a pilot who is at least as realistic as the Airfix one.

Bingo! Thanks for that; I've ordered a Pavla seat, which looks like it'll do nicely for a 50s Vampire. With a Flightpath instrument panel and an Aeroclub vac canopy, I'm ready to go. Thank you all for your input. And I'll donate the Airfix seat to one of my grandkids' Lego sets, where I think it belongs.

The NZAF flew FB.9s in Singapore and brought some back as instructional airframes. One is on a plinth at Ohakea, and another is at MoTaT in Auckland, where you can see that it has the standard RAF seat. As for the history of what was used locally I have no idea, but I did once have a conversation with an ex-airforce technician who had worked on Vampires: 'What were the seats made of?' "Metal" 'What colour were they?' "Green". (Well, it was a long time ago.) The seat pictured on Phillip Treweek's website is from NZ5769, an FB.5.

Thanks. Been there many times. It's way up in the air on the side of the hall on the far side -- good view of the wheel wells, but not a hope in hell of seeing anything of the cockpit other than a glimpse of the pilot dummy's helmet. James Fahey has some good photos online.

To kick things along a little, the seat I'm trying to achieve is not the SRBP (synthetic resin-bonded paper) one, which is brown; it's the metal one like this: http://www.kiwiaircraftimages.com/pages/ashvamp3.html Tony P

My new 1/48 Airfix Vampire has arrived; 18 days for halfway round the world - well done Mr Hannant for this time of the year. I've been tinkering with both Alley Cat and a Classic Airframes kits recently, never getting past the cockpit, and the one thing that struck me was the difference in the size of the seat. Alongside the other the seats from the other two, it looks like the wrong scale. I did a bit of measuring. left to right, the Alley Cat seat is 9.3 mm across the seat pan, the Classic Airframes one (with my first attempt at modifying the back to the sort used by the RNZAF) is 9.5mm, and the Airfix one weighs in at 10mm. For what it's worth, the 1/72 plans by both Ian Huntley and Alf Granger scale up tp 9.5mm. All very confusing. Is Airfix right and everyone else wrong? I'm also working on the Airfix 1/48 Tiger Moth, and the seat in that is 7.8mm across the base. I know that Tiger Moth pilots don't wear any high-altitude gear, but .... Tony P

Also available on Falcon Clear-Vax set 28: https://falconmodels.co.nz/clearvax/set28.html

The MOTAT Vampire is an RAF aircraft imported from Singapore as an instructional airframe. I believe that RNZAF Vampires had metal seats.

Well, there's the Mobil Mustang: http://venturapublications.com/store/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=41&products_id=117

When I started modelling in the 50s, the only small paint pots were primary colours of gloss house paint. I mixed the right colours, but was always disappointed by the result - the models looked like toys. Then I discovered artists' eggshell varnish. The difference was amazing! Substitute modern products and application methods and that's still what I do, except for subtle exhaust staining where it's typical. Even oil stains make it look like I've messed up the painting. I bear in mind that nearly everyone who sees my models has never seen the actual aircraft or even a photograph of it. Every aircraft had a factory finish at one stage.

I have the Mk.1, and got the vacform canopies that were intended to convert the Mk.1 to a Mk.3/4. However, there would be considerable messing about with the fuselage to accommodate the different rake of the windscreen, so that by the time I got around to it, Tamiya had at last produced the Mk.3 kit. Great, except that the sliding part of the canopy is badly coke-bottled. Both vacform canopies are the correct width of 2'6" = 15.9mm wide, but the Tamiya canopy is 2.4mm narrower to fit a narrower cockpit in a presumably narrower fuselage. The current plan is to use the sliding part of the Falcon canopy (https://www.falconmodels.co.nz/clearvax/set40.html) pruned to fit and posed in the open position. But it still looks too narrow compared with photos of the actual NZ6001.