sanguin

It seems to be a rare bird nowadays, but I have pm'd you with a possible UK source of the high wing red and gold John Player version. It may be affordable with current currency exchange rates! John

I must agree with all of the above, magazines and websites have revolutionised the hobby in so many ways. This applies to many of the authors who have been willing to share their hard-won knowledge of not only how to do things, but equally important, how to not do things. Not only can you see what others have been proud to publish, but also read their hints and tips about the kits they used and how they modified/ tolerated inaccuracies. Also hard-won advice on the joys/perils of painting, finishing, markings and actually displaying something. As to books, they can be very helpful and informative, but may also be counter-productive. The following tale is true, the folly of a man who began with Airfix in the 1950s and probably has never properly grown up. Personally I began to be interested in a theme of building kits of Swedish aviation in the late 1960s/early 1970s. Before that it was random Airfix/Matchbox/Frog etc. In Britain I was a minority of a minority of a minority. Magazines sometimes covered the Draken. Lansen and later the Viggen but little else. Correspondence with Swedish people was by post and I used something called 'International Reply Coupons' to pay for their return postage so they would write back to me. I rarely ever got a response, not even to polite requests for information from the Air attache of the Swedish Embassy in London. This was along time ago.... Heller made kits of four SAAB aircraft but that was about it. An Airfix Draken that was rather crude. A Matchbox J29. Malformed Canberras, Catalinas, C-47s., the odd Junkers and a vacform or two. It was only through IPMS UK and Ted Burnett that we later formed the Swedish Airforce Special Interest Group and gained both a membership and a degree of respectability. I write this as a warning. When you know little, you have fewer options to attain authenticity or realism or whatever you seek by making a decent replica. The quest for making the best can become self defeating. Over the years my hobby switched from making a few models, mainly fairly mediocre but some were good enough for a club stand, to amassing a collection of kits and books. Before the internet and websites it was just magazines and a limited range of books that were our main sources of information. As publishers sought authors who could plough the soil of history to turn up the stories that were unknown to us, we enjoyed discovering the range of things that we could replicate expand beyond our wildest dreams. There were books with decent illustrations, better paper and much more information, histories of airfields, squadrons, aircraft in their many versions, colour schemes and markings and covering a huge range of aviation. Suddenly my obsession (which it was in many ways) with things Swedish was diluted with learning about Air-Sea Rescue from Hawkinge in Kent, then 500 (County of Kent) Squadron, then the test/development aircraft flown at Farnborough/ Boscombe Down and so it went on.....the development of the Spitfire, captured aircraft in enemy markings, personal aircraft flown by senior officers, aviation oddities. I had a large and expanding library, a loft full of kits to match and neither the time nor inclination to build anything because I wasn't that good anymore. My standards were reduced by cataracts, dodgy vision in general, a chronic lack of time and a fear of having a lot more knowledge than skill. Even retirement increased my book collection but local community stuff replaced my meagre attempts at finishing builds. This is a confessional, really. And not a proud one either. My lungs are seriously damaged by ciggies and pneumonia and my life expectancy is now very short. So in the last year I have sold it all. There is no way I could leave that lot for my wife to sort and get rid of. Books, kits, decals, resin and white metal, the whole lot. I sold it all (well, there are a few kits stashed away, either part-built or just of interest to me, less than 20.....honest). Had I built all that I had stashed away then we would have had to live in the garden shed. It was ridiculous. So books are a useful addition to your knowledge, but they can become a diversion, an opportunity to vastly expand your knowledge but possibly at the expense of actually building models. Like everything in this life, you have to control what you do and 'moderation in all things' is perhaps the maxim to follow. Had I stayed with just the Swedish stuff, I could have binned all of my model collection a few years back and started again on more modern (but not always better) Swedish kits that have appeared and probably spent more money on beer and family and friends. This confessional may have bored many of you, amused a few and perhaps reflected something of the obsession that we have all had in differing degrees but it is how my relaxing hobby turned into something more. It may be that for some of us a surfeit of knowledge is a dangerous thing. No matter what, just try and enjoy your model making. And remember, not everything in life looks as good as the book illustration..... John

If you do a search on 'AFV Churchill' on this site you will find a lot of information. This link will be very useful: In general the AFV kits are excellent. Take your time, don't rush and you should end up with a nice model. The process with most modern kits of military vehicles is to work slowly and methodically and look at as many 'work in progress' sites as you can for the kit you are building. Those who have gone before are usually helpful in pointing out pitfalls and problems and usually how to avoid or work around them. Good luck, John

I sold Volumes 1 and 2 of Cold War Shield to The Aviation Bookshop a few weeks ago, along with all of my other aircraft tomes. Both books were in 'Very Good' condition and my Vol 2 was signed by Roger when it arrived from him, an unexpected surprise. I had bought Vol 1 from the Aviation Bookshop a few years ago, second hand but in very good condition. It was not cheap then! However both were well worth the money and invaluable references. I must say that £20 for Vol 2 is less than I would have expected but it may not have been the copy I sold them. Then again it is a weighty tome to lug around at Telford... Currently their website is down for rebuild/restoration but as they were selling Vol 2 at Telford it may be worth giving them a call re. Vol 1. They either still have it or they had a buyer within days of them getting it from me. John

He appears to be wearing sheepskin or similar leggings/trousers. Would this possibly indicate that he flies in some way in an aircraft or balloon or even an airship of some kind? Or were enlisted men in the Aviation Service granted the privilege of warmer legs than the ordinary U.S. soldiers? John

Which scale? Airfix produced their own kit in 1/72 and one from ESCI in 1/48. That might help; as far as I'm aware the 1/48 kit has not been part of the Airfix list for some years. John

Yeet, I don't know if you have looked at Scalemates, a site which gives you a lot of information about the history of different model kit mouldings. I searched for 'Revell 1/48 JU 52' and this came up: https://www.scalemates.com/kits/revell-03918-junkers-ju52-3mg4e--1119704 Have a look and it will give you details of the various boxings of the same plastic issued over the years but with different markings. A very helpful source of information for all of us; the difficult bit is trying to find a stockist who the issue that has the markings you want! Th Ju 52 had a number of variants, as Gooney Fan has indicated. Let Wikipedia and Google be your friend. However, in general most JU 52s were broadly very similar in appearance apart from the dorsal gun positions on some of the military versions. Good Luck. John

Perfect, thank you very much, Paul. So much for my P-51D theory..... Now I only have to work out why I have that canopy when I can't recall buying/making a single seat Vampire/Venom. I can usually recall the stuff from years ago, it's what happened yesterday that causes the domestic ire. John

Rummaging through some boxes this afternoon I found two Aeroclub canopies that I must have bought many years back. According to 'Joes Models' website, the one coded 'C023' is for a Hunter, which looks feasible. The other is coded 'C025' which is missing from the list that Joe has. 023 is a Hunter, 024 is a Hunter T7 and 026 is allegedly a Lightning T4. This might indicate that C025 is a single seat Lightning but it looks nothing like that. At a guess I would think it is for a P-51D Mustang or similar, sleek bubble top with deep sides beneath the windscreen. Can anybody tell me what the canopy is actually for, please? Thanks, John

Well, wherever the army stores the silver from laid-up regiments there is a silver model of an Abbot. My father was with 25 Regiment Royal Artillery and his mess bill included an automatic deduction to add a silver replica of their 'new equipment' to the Regimental collection. He suspected that as he was on the strength for a few years he probably owned more than 10% of the thing. If you ever get aa chance to look closely at the vehicle and equipment models made for regiments please take up the offer and savour the craftsmanship. Amazing work. The ones I have seen seemed to be 1/40th to 1/50th scale, usually on a very nice wooden base to adorn the tables on Dinner Nights. Also I think S&S made an Abbott kit from resin and white metal some years ago, probably 1/72 scale. If any exist they too must be collectors items. No help to us nowadays, of course. John

That looks very good, Chris. I'm pleased the old Pavla kit has gone to a good home, I know you will make a much better job of it than I could have done. It is always a pleasure to see so many 'older' kits that need very careful building or at least a degree of heavy fettling that turn out so well. Keep it up and one day perhaps the old Williams Seversky may slide onto your bench to challenge and demonstrate your skills! All the best, enjoy the beetle! John

Boyd, it is a question that many of us have asked! Another link to confirm the replies the others have given: https://forum.keypublishing.com/forum/historic-aviation/115663-navy-wessex-paint The blue-greys all seem to look similar depending upon the lighting, the film, the exposure and the printing. And that is just in books and magazines. On a computer screen ....who knows? John

Somewhere in the darker recesses of the loft I have a kit of the Mi-8, manufacturer unknown until I find it. However there are some pictures that may help you, I just did a search on Mi-8 Hip images and a few show the underside that may help you. Try: https://www.e-pic.se/Aircraft/Aircraft-sorted-by-type/Mil/Mil-Mi-8-Hip/i-vF5hxqd/ That has a few underside shots that may sort you out. I have also looked without success for various kit instruction sheets. There are a lot of 'Hip' kits, but most seem to be from the same original (and inaccurate, I'm afraid) KP moulds. I have not yet found instructions that show what you want, but that was only after a quick look on line. I will look in the loft later and see if my kit sheet is more helpful, but I am not optimistic! John

Google will reveal a lot of images, but in general very few seem to show the details you seek. There is one book: Gray Ghost: The RMS Queen Mary At War by Steve Harding but even that is light on detail. Probably the most obvious external features other than the paint job are the degaussing loop around the hull within a steel duct and extra carley floats/rafts on decks. Unlike the WW1 hospital ships it seems that the QM retained her exisitng lifeboats (or possibly larger ones later in the war but using the existing davits) and relied more on floats, rafts and some smaller boats on the foredeck for emergencies. Guns were fitted, but they are either airbrushed out by the censor or lost behind the mass of soldiery on the decks for departure or arrival photographs. Allegedly these were primarily 40mm Bofors type anti aircraft weapons but when these were removed late in the war a 6" gun was left as the sole offensive weapon. Other than that it was grey paint,usually pale grey although the tops of the funnels were restored to black later in the war. I have no information about the decks, most aerial views have them covered in troops so nothing is visible. This may not be of much help but there may be others more learned than me out there who know more. Now if you want to do the Queen Elizabeth in her war service, a lot more information seems to be around. All the best, John

Oh, and while your at it Mr decal producer, can you try and tack a few white 'Qinetic' labels on the sheet as well, please? The ETPS/RAE badges are few and far between on exisitng sheets so thanks for including them, Truro. John

Nigel, those bits of concrete were not for the large Chain Home towers. I have learned something today, I thought it ws another name for the Vintner site. Thanks to my magic tome, St Boniface Down was in fact a Chain Home Low site, the 'bedstead' antennae were mounted on wooden masts identical to those Ed Russell has modelled. These were designed to detect low flying intruders from across the Channel and North Sea. Many were operated by the Army and Navy, depending upon location and logistics. From 1941 they virtually all featured two power-turned antennae and either concrete or wooden huts. All were mounted to cover approaches from the sea, usually on higher ground. Most were set in places away from civilisation and in exposed sites where the winds blew and the rain was never vertical. Ventnor had a Chain Home station but I cannot say what, if anything, remains. Google Earth is good at helping to trace sites, the Dunkirk one even shows the shadows from all of the masts if you use the time line facility. John

This bit of a Britmodeller thread may help: Scroll down until you see three pages of profiles; at the bottom of the third page it says that the squadrons of No 4 Group used all black camouflage from 1941. No date in 1941 is given. I believe that 78 squadron was part of 4 Group and November is the 11th month so I would consider 'all black' to be probable.... I'm sure that somebody will come along and either make that 'certain' or prove me wrong. John

I live about half a mile from the site of the Dunkirk Chain Home station that was built in 1938. There is only one of the steel transmitter towers still standing. This link can tell you a bit more: http://www.subbrit.org.uk/sb-sites/sites/d/dunkirk_ch/index.shtml There are other links, the original structures around the site are equally interesting but rarely seen; a 240 foot steel lattice mast covered in modern aerials tends to attract the eye. I had the privilege of hearing about the building of the transmitting and receiving towers from an elderly resident many years ago. He worked with his father on the Dunkirk build, then stayed with the company and built towers around the UK. The original timber towers were prefabricated as creosoted pine lengths that were bolted together to form lattice or warren girder sections. They were bolted to a concrete base, each of the four main legs had its own base. Being timber they were relatively light and to erect a mast under ideal conditions took a gang of about ten men days rather than weeks. However they were not rigid. Being timber and bolted, once the height got near the 200ft mark the top swayed a bit. Peter Rook was in his eighties when he told me about it, he said that mostly they accepted the swaying but when he worked on the towers at Scapa Flow and the wind really began to blow it was very, very frightening. As the radar electronics improved the timber masts were replaced by galvanised steel to reduce the error due to the masts moving in the wind. They remained until the site was reduced to one mast nearly fifty years ago. From the 1950s that mast held a very large microwave dish that was part of the NORAD communications network. This was removed in the late 1990s and we no longer had USAF vehicles visiting the site. It is now commercially owned and used for a wide range of data links and comms aerials. There is now planning consent for a data storage building adjacent to the mast. One set of proposed plans for the new building showed a design similar to on an airfield control tower to show its RAF heritage. Ain't architects wonderful? The fact that virtually everything on site apart from the masts is either fully or partly underground and screened by large earth and brick blast walls never occurred to the designers. I also have a copy of Building Radar by Colin Robinson, published by English Heritage. At 600 odd pages it has fairly comprehensive coverage of the development and construction of UK radar sites up to 1945, but if anyone wants any more info then please PM me. Congrats on the lovely model of the Chain Low installation, nice one Ed! John

Living only a few miles from Throwley, I have both the 'Airfield Focus No 58' written by Anthony Moor published in 2003 and his much expanded 'Kent's Forgotten Airfield Throwley' from 2007. Both are interesting in themselves, but neither gives much in the way of photographic coverage to Be2c. The larger volume has one image of a ?doped linen Be2c of the RNAS serial 992 and a Be12 A6303 with no obvious squadron markings. If you want pictures of night fighting Pups or Camels, please buy the second version. Mine was £12.99 in the Faversham Society shop; I assume the second hand prices reflect the minority interest and small print run. As to the Be2, not worth your consideration, i'm afraid. John

Thank you for that, Graham. The Fundekals instructions do not show any fuselage band, which is the logical choice. I was bemused by the black band as normally the work done by the Medway Preservation Group is spot on for accuracy and this seemed to be so unusual. I am pursuing a third edition copy of the TB752 monograph just to see what that can tell me; I know where to get one but it ain't cheap! Thanks again, John

Andre, There is a kit, one 1/72 example that I have found is available in the UK: https://www.kingkit.co.uk/product/magna-resins-1-72-2572-douglas-skyraider-target-tug It is a Magna resin kit. These kits are not usually an easy build, the quality of the kits is varied as is the fit. If you get this it may be useful to get another 1/72 plastic Skyraider kit (such as Airfix) to replace some of the poorer quality resin parts from Magna. I know because many years back I bought and built the Magna kit, my first proper resin model. It was not a very good build, in part due to the kit but mainly due to my inexperience and lack of skill. I eventually threw it away, but not before I had decided to buy another kit from Magna to build 'one day' when I felt more skilled. I think that is possibly the same kit that Kingkit are offering, I sold it to them some years ago with a lot of other stuff when I had a clear out. It is not a kit for a novice but it is the only 1/72 Skyraider target tug in town. It even has Swedish civil markings. Good luck and I hope that it will make an excellent museum exhibit in hands more skilled than mine! John

I visited the Manston Museum a few days ago and the Spitfire TB752 does not feature a sky fuselage band, but has a black band. If you look at the 'virtual walk around' on the Museum website you can see it: https://www.spitfiremuseum.org.uk/360virtualtour I am surprised that nobody commented on this in the previous entries on this thread; the volunteer I to whom I mentioned this at the museum said she thought it had 'always been like that' and and could offer no explanation. I have always thought that any fuselage band should either be in sky or not present at all after repainting post war. To be correct with its red/white/blue spinner I assume that it should not have any fuselage band (either sky or black). Please can anyone clarify whether the scheme as shown on TB752 is correct, an error or still unresolved and painted black to indicate this. Thanks, John

I claim no knowledge about paints or any of the technical stuff about colours, hues, reflectance and the other variables that some of our far more learned members can deploy. However my personal view of Bosun Blue is a very dark blue that would appear to have been darkened using either black or very dark grey mixed into the basic blue. If this makes sense, a deep blue is still clearly seen as blue but Bosun Blue is a dark colour that appears to be blue. Also it does not appear to have any obvious green tones present. If I need to mix it I add drops of black to any dark blue until it satisfies my eye; utterly unscientific but I suspect that is what happened at squadron level. I would be delighted if any other members could make any better suggestions using a less empirical basis to describe the colour. John (who despite the astigmatism and short sight apparently has good colour vision when looking at blood cells and bacteria down a microscope).

I cannot think of any single source that covers even the RAF squadron bars, never mind the huge range of decorative squadron/unit images used elsewhere. This applies to both books and, as you requested, on line. The nearest I have found for the RAF is this: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Royal_Air_Force_squadron_roundels To find out about each individual squadron, click on the link below its 'bars'. Not much on why the colours/pattern were chosen by each unit and what was done to ensure that there was no duplication or 'near misses' when they were first suggested. I believe that a few were based on some of the symbols/shapes used in the First World War or their earlier RFC/RN badges, but I am happy tone corrected by others. I presume that some hapless and lowly desk-bound officer had to carefully balance squadron histories, seniority and what they proposed to either approve or reject the designs. Then some much more senior officer who had past connections with the squadron would change it all... Allegedly my 'home' squadron (500, Royal Auxiliary Air Force had the green orchards of Kent zig-zagging through the white cliffs of chalk on a background of the waters of the English Channel. Not too obvious to the uninitiated.... Can anyone else contribute any other sources? John

The Tiger Meet site has no useful images: https://www.natotigers.org/tiger-meets However for those looking through their archives, the 53rd used F-105Ds for the Tiger Meets during 1961-65, F-4D Phantoms during 1966-76 and F-15A/B from 1977 onward. There seem to have been a small range of 'Tiger' patches, most variants of that found above by Dennis. Images of Phantoms bearing the badge are very few, in part because the badge was of modest size in those days. Exotic tiger stripes adorning front line fighters were not the norm in those days! John Late extra! I found this which may or may not help: http://forums.airshows.co.uk/viewtopic.php?f=40&t=5238 Said to be 1972 pictured at Upper Heyford.