Uncle Pete

Very nice indeed and brings back memories for me. First time I ever flew was in a Viscount. Must have been 1960, Dad had started doing well and treated the family to a flight up to Scotland on BEA.

Maybe it fought you but you won by a knock out.

Beauty! I try to get my planes to pass the "Two Metre Test". That one passes the "Two Centimetre Test"!

Rigging in 1:72 strikes me as a level of masochism tantamount to brushing one's teeth with concentrated nitric acid. (Actually, building vacform kits strikes me the same way). You have nothing to complain about with your results... Great job.

Another beauty. Admit it... You have an army of elves hidden in your workshop, right?

Cracking job... She's been rode hard and put away wet, that's for sure!

Me too, mate... I've encountered "Fit The Box" before. I'm a 1:72 man but this puppy only comes in 1:39 and I've wanted a Wright for a long time. It's getting its own stand alone box and will be separate from the Shepherds Bush Air Force, although I suppose that will have to be renamed the Buckley Air Force now. I'd asked my daughter if she still had her daughter's old hamster tank for the purpose and she showed up with a snake tank (sans snake, of course) which, with a few modifications and the addition of some LED lights will fill the bill nicely. Trouble is, I now have to cut everything off the base and make a new one to... erm... "Fit The Box"!

Not so sure I overcame them... Beat them into submission is more like it! That's where I should have left mine... I might still have hair! This kit put enough in the jar that I could buy an F 35... A real one! I don't know if it's perseverance or simply being a dam fool about it! I'd like to take credit for the stand but it came with the kit. Thanks... I think I'm going to like it here. The scenery and the warm people remind me of Scotland where I spent all my summers as a kid. Pidsley is okay now but Popsie will be in therapy for months. Any time you visit your old stomping ground, give me a shout... The kettle is always on here. Thanks, guys, for the kind words and encouragement. I like to spread a few laughs around if I can. I just need to get out of the habit of trying to make cops laugh when I get pulled over... They can be such grouches!

I've not been able to build anything for a while having moved house in the Summer from London to Flintshire but finally managed to get a workshop set up in the spare bedroom. I stumbled upon Revell's Wright Flyer in a bits and bobs shop in Mold, paid far too much for it (don't ask) and took it to my new home in anticipation of a relatively easy build. How wrong could I be? This was an absolute ig-pay to put together! I'd looked at the plans and the parts and thought, I can handle this, I'll have a look at the Britmodeller site and see if anybody's done it so I can pick up a tip or two. Right now I have to give many, many thanks to Bengalensis who put his excellent build on the forum abut 5 years ago and without who's help mine would have been in the bin after the first few sessions at the bench. As I looked through his procedure and the way it varied from the instructions I saw the logic of his process and decided shamelessly to copy as much as I could. With a confident cry of "Onward and upward!" I donned the magic glasses... When I got this far... ... I began to suspect a phone call had been made... ...but I soldiered on. I've never tried to rig a biplane before but I thought, this is a big scale, 1:39 (Excuse me? 1:WHAT??? What kind of wacked out scale is 1:39?) so how hard can it be? By the time I got this far I'd stretched my vocabulary, honed over 40 years in the music business, 20 of them at sea, to the limit and the cats were wearing earmuffs lest they die from shock. Fortunately the missus is a working class lass from Liverpool so she was unaffected... I couldn't make head nor tail of a lot of the rigging despite having several pictures and diagrams available at my googletips and the excellent pictures on Bengalensis' build so my attempt went progressively from "I wanna rig this right on the nose" to "Let's get it really close" to "Maybe I can get it reasonably convincing" finally settling at "Well, it's near enough for rock n roll". All in all it's the hardest build I've attempted to date but I think it can get through the "Two Metre Test", even with clean glasses. I've never attempted any sort of diorama work before either so I used a bit of hardboard for the base figuring it was a decent facsimile of sand colour and did a bit of Jackson Pollock to mucky it up. Here she is, all done and dusted. Wilbur came out looking like my dad, although I can't picture the old boy running with so much energy. I think the last time dad ran at all would have been in RAF boot camp in 1940. I'd thought a successful engineer and businessman like ol' Willie would have worn a watch but when I considered my chances of painting a fine chain across his waistcoat I decided he just kept it loose in his trouser pocket. And is it my imagination or does Orville bear more than a passing resemblance to Super Mario? That moustache gave me a lot of headaches and went to the point of "Stop, Pete, before you make it even worse!" I know it won't win any prizes at the model shows but I'm betting it's the best Wright Flyer on my street, if not all of Buckley. There are four kits waiting for me in the shed including the new(ish) Airfix Wimpy that's supposed to be the cat's pajamas but the workshop has to get removed from the guest bedroom for a couple of weeks in anticipation of a visit from my sister so you're all spared from viewing more of my bodging a little longer. A table cluttered with paints, glues and the other various accoutrements of plastic sticking is not the sort of thing an old lady likes to see in the morning before she's had the first cup of tea. Cheers, lads, as usual I hope the prose gave you more to laugh at than the pictures.

Blimey... That puppy really jumps out at you! Cracking idea and cracking job.

Done... Thanks. I guess it's now on my shopping list.

Jeez... As if I'm not cyberphobic enough!

Thanks for the lead, mate. I'd put "UV Glue" into the site's search window but came up snake eyes so I figured I'd ask.

I've just stumbled upon an ad for UV Glue, something I'd never known existed (dentists notwithstanding). Seems to be a bright idea. Has anybody given it a whack on their models and, if so, is it worth trying?