Richard Humm

Reading through the Airfix catalogue, I see there's going to be a new range of Humbrol acrylic paints in dropper bottles. Does this mean that they're changing the supplier again? IIRC, there was a change a year or two back to manufacture by HMG in Manchester, resulting in a new type of jar (back to flip-top, although the catalogue shows the current range in the screw-top containers that were used before them).

Maybe it's another Academy rebox. They do both generations of F/A-18. A hundred quid for the 1/12 Bentley? I remember when it was £2.50. (Then again, a 1/72 scale Spitfire was 17p back then...)

The Draken was one of the tools sold to Argentina in the mid-1980s. They are currently being sold there as Modelex kits - website here.

Note that the diagram shows the fuselage sides as a graded tone area rather than Intermediate Blue. IIRC, Vought were the only manufacturer to actually produce aircraft with a graded finish on that area, going from White to Sea Blue as a continuous change of colour rather than one different colour in between.

You may not have been the first to come up with the idea - after Aurora copied a couple of early Hawk kits in the early 1950s, Hawk are supposed to have included "Hawk" in morse code in the rivets of their kits, according to Thomas Graham's book about Aurora.

The 1/72 scale Ju 88A-1 is a bit of a surprise - it's the first kit of that variant in the scale.

There's a Haynes Manual on the Vulcan that has a lot of detail photos and illustrations which would probably help with a large scale build. It might be worth having a look in a local branch of The Works to see if they still have cheap copies (the one I got from them was £6.00), though it's not currently listed on their website.

Lesney were the original owners of Matchbox but went into receivership in 1982, shortly after the Victor was issued. Universal Toys, the subsequent owners, only issued a limited number of kits after that, with the largest aircraft being the Chinook, before selling the moulds and a limited licence of the brand to Revell around 1990.

A P-47 that Airfix might find worth producing is the P-47N. The Heller and Italeri kits of that variant are pretty awful, and it's still a Thunderbolt to the general public. There aren't the variety of colour schemes that there are for earlier P-47s, admittedly.

If they're going for the 70s nostalgia market, a Rod Stewart cassette should be the musical accompaniment.

The original Hasegawa tooling did have the engraved stars, as they are mentioned in the 1966 IPMS Magazine review of the kit. Hasegawa may well have removed them later on (they definitely made changes to some of the other early tools, like the Lightning), but I think both boxings of the FROG kit still had them.

Well, the B-52 was first issued in 1967 so it's definitely classic Monogram - it would need the "jet engine sound" to be a real original, though!

I've got a load of old Revell and Monogram kits, so I could get involved. My suggestion for a cut-off point is when the two companies merged in 1986, which still lets the Monogram 1/48 scale Century Series jets in.

For classic Revell, I'd say before the Ceji takeover in 1979 or possibly go up to the merger with Monogram in 1986, as then we could take classic Monogram as up to the same date. Italeri might be more difficult, as they haven't had any changes of management, and they started rather later than most of the other major manufacturers, around 1970. Perhaps with them, the whole of the 1980s could be included. The Gripen and the Bf 109F are from the 1990s so might be a bit later than a "classic" period, while your other kits are 1970s and 1980s so could be included.

No, the Revell F-101B was a new tool (in 1991! Where does the time go?) which looks like a scaled down version of the Monogram kit. It has nothing to do with the Matchbox kit.