RJP

Me too, hired a guy to do the bathroom and legged it until he was done. Worked a treat. I have since done the rest of the house myself including a kitchen gut and rebuild and still wouldn't try a bathtub installation myself. Way too fraught.

It depends on the finish you want to achieve. If it's a porous-looking surface you want, give it a try. You might get away with a spray because the paint will be nearly dry when it hits the surface but that seems to leave a lot to chance. For something smoother, or shinier, why not a basic primer? In any case, a primer will ensure a uniform surface to work on. I just finished renovating my house, including patching many small dings in plaster walls and sheets of new drywall whose joints had to be mudded. In all cases, a coat of primer was necessary to achieve an invisible patch. If I hadn't done that there would be obvious porous spots. No big problem to do it, just neatness and patience. I found that a small tub of pre-mixed drywall joint compound worked out cheaper than hand-mixed spackling and was a lot more convenient. Perhaps that's an option. And craft stores sell various products for finishing cast plaster figurines and doodads.

You will never be finished renovating. Ask me how I know.😃

The ICM Stearman certainly looks like a winner. It comes in two flavours, the PT-17 and PT-13 so both Continental and Lycoming versions are available.

This suggestion won't help the present situation of course but a tip or two for next time: Make sure the underlying surface is really smooth before applying the tape. That eliminates gaps. Burnish the masking down with a flat hard tool like the edge of a wooden spoon. After masking apply a coat of the underlying colour. It will seal the edge and be invisible because there is no colour change. Then apply the second colour. Pray.

What a neat idea, a variation on the dreaded Secret Santa and an antidote to those who take things too seriously.

Some details on 'Ropey': Ropey was KB772, a Mk. X, and did 66 trips with 419 Squadron. I believe the shark mouth markings were applied for the trip home. There are several photographs on the 'net taken at Yarmouth Nova Scotia after the return. If you google KB772 for images you will see an RCAF pattern hangar in the background. The trip home must have come as an enormous relief and high spirits seem to have resulted in a proliferation of non-standard markings. Somewhere there ia a picture of a machine outbound for Canada with what amounted to Type C roundels on the upper surfaces. There are one or two shots about with whitewall tires; white painted of course. One note about KB772. The Canadian Museum of Science and Technology has a website with many photographs of RCAF types. Not exactly up to scratch in some ways including captioning so some care needs to be taken. One shot was a reverse image of Ropey, seeming to show the name on the starboard side of the nose. Not saying it wasn't there but I'd be surprised. Also the CWH made the trip to the UK several years ago and wore the sharkmouth for decoration for the trip so you might well find some colour shots of the reproduction.

With all those fixes, changes and refinements it looks like more fun than the average kit. Have you estimated the time it will take, beginning to end? I'm not sure I'd be too confident trying one that big without a dedicated workshop and a door with a lock on it.

Sounds OK in principle and I'm sure there are many who would applaud it. But how many of us would actually part with coin of the realm? How many of that smaller number would build it? Speaking for me, there are enough UnFinished Objects (UFOs as the knitters call them) to keep me occupied just about forever. And for my executor to have to dispose of. One has to suppose Airfix have it somewhere on a wish list, together with a graph showing how many examples they'd have to sell to generate a break even position. The usual slurs on the bean counters may be injected here but it sounds like too high a risk to me. I'd like them to stay alive longer than me!

Larger ailerons?

I'm curious to know exactly what is wrong with the Frog kit. I'm sure many - even most - kits are imperfect in some respects but what specifically are we talking about here?

This kit originated with Inpact in 1966 as part of a series of pre-WW I types. There was a movie tie-in with Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines. Some or all later appeared under the Pyro, Likelike and finally Lindberg names. They were well received way back when they first appeared and the pictures seem to say they've held up well. Curiously, Scalemates indicates the later of two Lindberg releases include new parts, though indication what they might be. Ideas? Hmm, just had a thought, the kit was released 55 years after the original flew, and here we are 54 years after that. An enduring interest.

Not just USAAF equipment, the change applied to all arms. Whether or how quickly the change was actually applied to specific machines could vary with local conditions, as did the length of time the variation existed after the official change to blue. As always, photographs are the best guide.

Hannants has been around since 1890 and I have always found them utterly reliable. Seasonal postal delays are a fact of life but they don't seem to have bitten - yet. Just this morning I received (in Toronto. Ontario) a letter from my solicitor in Yeovil. It was posted on November 23 and arrived here in four days flat, plain old air mail no special service. No muss, no fuss.

Moulded in markings were all the go. The Aurora kits of my youth took it a step further. They didn't just do outlines, some of them had a rough raised finish that ensured the decals didn't stick snugly. Eventually trapped air let them flake off. If there had been aftermarket transfers back then a kid could have had another go at it. Hawk did better. Their T-6s and others had cleanly engraved outlines, easily solved with a swipe of tube filler and a bit of primer.

This publication covers the evolution of Typhoon markings in some detail, including the use of the yellow upper surfrace bands: https://boxartden.com/reference/gallery/index.php/Modeling-References/Camoflage-Markings/04-Hawker-Tornado-Typhoon

There are loading diagrams in both the Haynes Owners Workshop Manual for the Lancaster and in The Lancaster Manual. Useful stuff. Bearing in mind that bombs were temporary items, unless you want a specific load or are depicting a specific job you're on pretty firm ground following the charts.

The Airfix VI / XVIII didn't have you saw the nose off. I wonder if you're thinking of the bomber-nose Frog effort with its alternative Mk VI parts. That one did need rhinoplasty. It was nowhere as sly as the way Tamiya provided for alternate noses. Instead, the panel with the 20 MM gun apertures was separate on the Airfix kit and there was a similar one for the 57 MM.

AIrfix has had a lot of Mosquito kits over the years - which one do you mean?

I don't think I've heard the Hasegawa kit's tail was too small for any Wildcat prior to the FM-2, perhaps check against a photograph or reliable drawing. That said, reworking the fin isn't much of a problem, a knife and file to cut down the FM-2 tail. The challenge is all up front and that's a lot of mucking about. As noted the FM-2 had a much different, shorter chord, cowling to accommodate the single row engine (and the fuselage aft of it lengthened to make up the difference). Add to that the different exhaust arrangement and different prop. And of course you'd need to source a two-row R-1830. I'm not sure I'd balk at the Hasegawa kit as you''d really only need the gun alterations which are pretty minor.

I had a look in my files and there was the instruction sheet from 1975, scanned recently when I was disposing of decomposing paper files. The kit was designed for the Airfix Hunter F.6, specified in the instructions. Like Airfix kits of the era, packaging was a simple cardboard header stapled to a poly bag holding the few parts. The instructions were printed on the inside. There was a small side view showing the location of the cut to remove the nose and an outline of the tail fairing to be used as a template. You had to source your own 60 thou card for that. The parts amounted to a great lump of nose from just ahead of the engine intakes, plus a fairing for the upper fuselage. It was in a quite hard white plastic and you were instructed to use polystyrene cement . There must have been a canopy though it isn't illustrated. The price sticker shows I bought it for $1.99 at Hobby House in Ottawa. The date code on the sticker was 1975.

It was an extension of the 1960s model car treatment of customizing kitsch. AMT led the way with cars and they were wildly popular at the time. MPC was based near Detroit - it must have rubbed off. At one point there were sprues of chrome plated customizing parts and decals that were the product of someone's fever. The A6M was one, perhaps others. The basic kit seems to have been kept undisturbed and the changes were add-ons. Oh wow, man, the sixties.

The yellow ones on the left jumped right off the screen at me, and not for the odd colour. I have the Airfix 1958 in front of me and that is defintely the source. I can't account for the colour - the original Airfix were in black (I have most of the one my late brother built in 1958) and also a complete Airfix by Craftmaster (one of the US releases from my own stash) that came in silver. The Craftmaster kits were commonly silver though I have an MPC release of the Airfix B-17G in white. I recall (confirmed by Scalemates) that MPC also released the same kit with markings for DG595, the second prototype Lancaster from 1941; DG595 flew with yellow undersides. So maybe that's the source. Oldmodelkits.com has a couple listed but maddeningly don't mention yellow plastic. Perhaps that would have been a deterrent!

That sounds just like a recipe for confusion. Aircraft serials and registrations change all the time for a number of reasons. A military machine goes to a new country or moves on to civilian ownership. Recognise that by all means but change what you are calling the machine in a discussion and pretty soon you've lost the thread of what you are talking about. There are examples. I have MT818 with four different identities - MT818, N32, G-AIDN and N58JE. I have a Mustang recorded with 8 different identities and another with nine. I imagine there are plenty more examples. You'll need a trail of breadcrumbs to get back alive from a discussion of T-6 identities. Which do you choose - and how do you avoid confusing the reader or the poor guy you're talking to without having to detour into endless detail? My favourite remains Lancaster FM213. It was FM213 all its life right up until it was retired by the RCAF in the 1960s. Eventually it reached CWH at Hamilton Ontario where it is painted as a memorial to Andrew Mynarski VC. Fair enough but they painted the serial as KB726 which was destroyed (in the action for which Mynarski was awarded the VC) in 1944. I had a conversation with a member there many years ago who actually believed the machine they so carefully maintain and fly is KB726. She was a true believer and there was no explaining it to her; I eventually gave up and fled.

It's worth mentioning that filler is one of those well-intentioned materials that does its job beautifully. But its properties are different from the surrounding styrene and can't be expected to act the same way. So large gaps - deep or wide - need to be rendered immobile before the filler is applied. When you get to the sanding stage any movement in the structure will produce cracks in the now-dry filler. Shims from plastic sheet, hunks of sprue and patience. Letting the joint really cure before spackling produces a superior result.