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To finish up 2020 I thought I'd get the collection (started in 2017 with Gibson's G George) out for an elephant walk. With 28 planes, though, single file would have been highly impractical so here is the Buckley Air Force in full rock n roll regalia. Two more planes, built in flight, are not shown and there are a few which sadly ended up in landfills when the frustration of trying to get the blasted things together got too much for me. Admittedly I don't have much skill but at least the hobby keeps me out of pubs and away from fast women. My wife thinks I'm quite mad... And she may be right!

Greetings, Britmodellers, here I offer two more not-ready-for-Telford efforts from the Flintshire Centre of Plastic Disasters. Wanting to increase my WW1exhibit (consisting of a Camel and two Fokker whiffers) I bought a Roden SE5a and an Airfix BE2c. Pulling the SE out of the box first I rolled up my sleeves, spat on my hands and settled down to work. Now I enjoy a challenge as much as the next bloke but this was akin to riding a unicycle up Everest while playing Mozart’s 40th symphony on bagpipes. The detail on the kit is very nice indeed but after several days of struggle with no cheat pegs and seemingly unclampable parts I reached the point where I was wondering how to say, “Your mum swims out to meet troop ships” in Czech so I binned the blasted thing and replaced it with a Revell one. No more Roden kits for me… I’ll leave that devilish east European brand to you clever geezers who have skill and patience. The replacement kit had no interior and the Lewis gun was quite naff so I used the appropriate bits from the Roden box. With my usual slapdash, semi-scale (more semi than scale) approach I got this far-more-user-friendly kit together and present it as another kite flown by the indomitable Squadron Leader A.C. Plonk. In this plane while on patrol in the dead of winter he’d chased a strange-looking red aircraft piloted by a fat fella with a white beard. Fortunately, S/L Plonk was a terrible marksman and despite emptying his ammo drum he failed to shoot down Santa Claus. The Airfix BE was quite well-appointed for an old fumble-fingers like me and the engineers were sporting enough to include a couple of little jigs to get the wing struts in at the correct angles. Alignment was thus quite easy and virtually Pete-proof. I wish they'd done the same with the undercarriage! Paint schemes in the instructions didn’t really blow my hair back so I poked around on Google Images and cobbled together something that appealed to me a bit more. The gun was an interesting wrinkle in this kit… For reasons known only to themselves, Mssrs Airfix had moulded the gun backwards on the mount with instructions to cut it off and glue it back the right way round. S/L Plonk had flown this one with his observer, Sgt Nigel “Mole-Eyes” Bader. Nigel didn’t make a name for himself but you might have heard of his son in WW2, Fred Bader, who played piano in the NAAFI at the RAF base in Uxbridge. Teaming up Plonk’s questionable piloting with the obtuse observational skills of "Mole-Eyes" Bader proved to be a mistake when the targeting information provided by their reconnaissance caused the raid intended to destroy Kaiser Bill’s cocktail cabinet went horribly wrong and a whole squadron of Sopwith Pups (and a couple of kittens) were instead dispatched to strafe a small brothel near Ypres. You may have noticed a mismatch in the wheels. Having both kits on the bench simultaneously I absent-mindedly glued the SE's wheels (already painted) to the BE and the glue had cured before I noticed so rather than trying to detach them and possibly wrecking the undercarriage completely I decided I could live with it. Thanks for looking and, as usual, I hope the prose provoked more laughter than the pictures (although laughing at my builds doesn't offend me in the least... I laugh at them myself!).

When I was music director on cruise ships there were six words my boss the cruise director could say that always filled me with dread... "Pete, I've had a great idea". Now that I'm retired I find myself doing the same thing to myself. The plan was, take an Airfix Spitfire starter set that I found in a charity shop for £3 and turn it into a pylon racer owned by the airline I created for the missus when I turned this Halifax (charity shop, £4) into a "Handley Page Liverpool." I should know better but with a gleeful cry of "Dunning? Kruger? Never heard of them. Hold my beer!" I got stuck in. The plan was to put blisters on the nose to make room for the bigger and more powerful Rolls Royce Dragonslayer V-Several engine (packing the power of 2800 horses, three camels and a badger), install an oversize prop blagged from the Halifax above (which had come with two sets), add some extra exhaust pipes (also from the Halifax), switch out the undercarriage for fixed trike gear with pants and spats (because it looks more "sporty") and emblazon it with sponsor stickers like a F1 race car. Sometimes that which looks good on the coach's clipboard doesn't work so well on the field of play. Got off to a halfway decent start by gluing the halves of a bomb in place... Then made some underpinnings out of plasticard... Applied a metric ton of filler, sanded my fingers to the bone, then had symmetry problems, masking disasters and a canopy that didn't want to fit for love nor money. It had become a Lemony Snickett build (a series of unfortunate events). "Kit Fatigue" set in after a couple of weeks of futzing and fettling so I just finished the blasted thing with warts and all. (I had built a perfect 1:72 scale model of the Dragonslayer engine out of duct tape, chewing gum and toenail clippings but sadly forgot to photograph it before gluing the fuze shut). A slight miscalculation of the U/C and prop means the plane can also be used to mow the runway. I'm not sure if the canopy popped up a bit while the glue was setting or if I simply hadn't noticed the left side when I installed it but the thought of cutting it off and doing it again was a bit too daunting so it'll have to sit in the cabinet with the right side facing out! But, of course, the right side had the worse masking mess. Sponsors were recruited from the wife's tastes... Marks and Spencer, Versace, Prosecco, Jimmy Choo etc and, of course, her favourite footy boys, Everton... Out of curiosity, does anybody else find Mr Decal paper to be a bit "grabby"? I had a lot of trouble slipping the decals into place (or not into place!) I raise my hat to you clever blokes that scratchbuild successfully! Of course you're cheating with all that stuff you have like skill, ability, patience... Much as my execution was, shall we say, a bit dodgy I still like the idea and having had a bit of practice may give it another whack after Christmas when the £2 and £3 kits show up in Aldi and the charity shops. Here she is with a couple of unmodified Spits... Now it's onward and upward as I'm about to tackle a Roden SE 5 which will be totally OOB. Wish me luck! Cheers, lads.

Greetings, Earthlings, from Planet Pete where plastic and paint find themselves cruelly tortured until they form the approximate shape of an aeroplane. My three latest efforts, (built as usual with more enthusiasm than skill) are a trip through the generations. I’ll begin with the D VII. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Somewhere along the way I’d read “Von Richtofen is usually associated with the DR 1 but actually preferred the D VII” (or words to that effect). That settles it… Nurse, put down your magazine and unlock the knife drawer, it’s time to supervise me for my own safety, I’m about to build the Red Baron’s D VII. Except he never had one. Yep, googling like a madman turned up no pictures and asking on this site told me what I should have known in the first place… Ask Wiki. Turns out what I hadn’t retained from whatever it was I’d read was he’d test-piloted it, given tips to the engineers and thought the final result was the best thing since striped pajamas but the poor schmuck used his heart to slow down a .303 before he got to unpack his from the crate. The good news is, I can now get it wrong and still get it right. Basing the scheme on his Tripehound I followed the K.I.S.S. principle, a plain all-over red with white control surfaces and a bit of aluminium around the engine. The kit had come with plain crosses but I thought the old boy deserved a bit more fizz so I printed up some proper iron ones. While I had the decal paper going I decided he also deserved a monogrammed cockpit. This is only my second bipe (not counting the Wright Flyer but that’s in a scale of manageable size) and I salute all of you who specialise in WW1… I studiously avoided camera angles that betrayed my somewhat …”alleged” alignment. That was about the time my old dad was being born (and while his dad was being awarded a one-way ticket to the front). On to roughly the time my brother was being born. It’s another (yawn) Spitfire. It was an Airfix, if I remember correctly, Mk V (and probably another letter in lower case). Rather relaxing build, I must say. As I cut the parts off the sprues they gave me a cheery wave, wandered over to the assembly area and gathered themselves together. Everything OOB except our hero, Squadron Leader A.C. Plonk. This was the plane in which he was shot down by a V1. In his official debriefing he stated, “I approached the V1 from directly behind in order not to alert the pilot…” (I should mention at this point S/L Plonk was not the sharpest knife in the drawer) “…and gave it a short burst. One of my bullets must have hit the spinny thingy on the front because it flew back at me and clipped a few inches off my prop.” His subsequent hard landing on Brighton Pier bruised his coccyx and qualified as enough of a battle injury to earn him the occasional pint at the local. And bypassing my own generation we go on to an (ahem) indeterminate number of years after I was born. May I present the F 35 or, as I like to call it, the White Elephant. Examining the lines of this as I was wrestling it together it occurred to me if the stealth engineers and the aerodynamics engineers drink at the same pub they’d be fighting in the car park most of the time. Italeri kit. I really like their big, detailed, in-colour instructions, they’re so fool-proof they’re almost Pete-proof. It was one of those kits that are very friendly for a while but then turn around and bite you in the bum during final assembly. I believe the kit engineer designed the weapons bay doors while in the throes of a crippling hangover. Those doors treated me like they’d caught me in bed with their wife. And painting the zigzag stuff on top had the nurses running to my side as my howls of frustration echoed through the asylum. I scoured the Plonk family tree and discovered S/L Plonk has a cousin in the US, Lt Col P. Lincoln Plonk of the Rhode Island Air Force. (“Plink” to his friends). This is the aircraft he used in the Great Toy War of 2018. (He was supposed to use an F 117 but it was so stealthy he could never find the blasted thing). Mattel was attempting to attack Pawtucket with an invasion force of Batman Action Figures and the defending force of Cabbage Patch dolls from the Hasboro factory was being overwhelmed. When Col Plonk dropped a full load of Hasboro’s Disney Princesses, the Batman Action Figures were thrown into confusion and the invasion ended as they all took the princesses to fancy hotels in Central Falls. Plink Plonk was given the key to the city which he promptly used to start it and drove Pawtucket to Foxwoods Casino in Connecticut for the weekend. As usual, thanks for looking in and I hope you found the text funnier than the models. (If you knew Rhode Island you'd know "fancy hotels in Central Falls" is hilarious!)

This is not a specifically WW2 question but I'm guessing it would be the busiest section in which to ask... Occasionally I'd like to build a plane in flight but pilot figures in the box are as rare as rocking horse poo. I've poked around on the internet looking for a solution but can't seem to unearth anything that fits my needs. Can anybody steer me towards a source of "generic pilots"? (Sorted by era, of course). All I'm after, really, is a bloke sitting ready to go into the cockpit but they all seem to come with everything but... Pilots leaning on things, standing chatting, looking things over, but little in the way of "just sitting there". (I'm not exactly the most skilled researcher in the world and the answer has probably been staring me in the face all along but I'll just hide behind my usual excuse of old dog struggling with new tricks!)

I'm trying to figure out how to paint a D VII for ol' Manny. He's usually depicted with a Tripehound but I understand his preferred ride was the D VII. Haven't been able to get Google to cough up any pictures of Von Richtofen's VII at all... Have I got the wrong end of the stick somewhere? Worst comes to worst I'll just base it on the millions of pics of his DR 1 but I'd like to do it without so much guesswork. Since waterboarding Google is not an option, does anybody have any old pictures squirrelled away? Edit... Just had a look at Wiki (should have done that before I asked on the forum!) and saw he worked on the development and loved it but never got to fly one in combat. If nobody has a better idea, I guess it's off to the strange world of Uncle Pete's imagination...

Here at the North Wales Home for Retired Rock n Roll Maniacs there isn't much to do except pinch the nurse's bottom... And he's getting fed up with it so I built a few models. Rather than give each one a dedicated slot I figured I'd only knock one deserving guy off the front page instead of three. First out of the box was an Italeri F 100. As I remember not a terribly interesting kit to build but enough to keep me amused for a while. Everything straight out of the box, paint colours carefully selected from a brand called "What I had kicking about". Decals were a bit on the thick side. The yellow one round the intake gave me no end of aggro. If I remember correctly the dangly bits were a bit of a bear to align... And I'm not sure why an Air Force plane would have a tailhook but the plan said put it on so I put it on. Anyway, there she is, for better or worse. Next up we have a creaky old British classic, the Hunter. A plane dear to my heart as it was the first fast jet I ever saw at an air show when my dad took me to Biggin Hill in 1962. This was Revell and an enjoyable build. Plenty of cheat pins in all the right places so I could get things aligned nicely. I love their big, glossy, detailed instruction booklets, too. I've just remembered I didn't install the pitot yet. For the final painting and decalling it was already a minefield of sticky-outy bits and I knew an inch of needle-thin plastic poking out of a wingtip had no chance of surviving the ordeal. Once again the paint was carefully selected from the set of what I had and the subset of what I think would make it look proper 'ard. Third up was a rather disappointing kit. Can't remember the brand but it wasn't one of the big boys. It's an F 117. Only about half a dozen major parts, not enough cheat pins so alignment of half-shells was quite challenging and as much detail as the real thing, that is, none. So after putting it together I had this... Whoops... Sorry... That's a kipper... Looks just like a Stealth Fighter, though, eh? Here she is... I made nose art for it but, of course, it doesn't show over the black so until I can figure out how to paint a precise circle of white exactly the right size it only exists on paper... Like my cats, it's black and impossible to photograph... I'd made and already shown off a whiffer. I call it the Handley Page Liverpool, a passenger version of the Halifax dedicated to the wife and her Scouse heritage. After putting it in the cabinet, it occurred to me there were no jetways in the 50s so I needed a set of stairs and a boarding bus. The stairs I whacked together out of plastic card and the bus was an Opel Blitz and I can't remember the brand. I'd have preferred a Leyland or some other British make but it was the only suitable vehicle I could find in 1:72. I do remember it was an absolute pig to put together, though. Thanks for visiting my display cabinet and help yourself to a cup of tea. Milk and sugar are on the shelf above the cups.

Hello again, lads, it's time for another offering from Uncle Pete's Emporium of Questionable Plastic Things. I'd found this Revell Halifax in a charity shop for four quid but discovered upon opening the box it had neither instructions nor decals. Instructions in this day and age of the internet are easy to come by but decals, not so much so I thought if I had to make decals anyway, why not be adventurous. My lovely missus is very patient with my hobby and although she's firmly of the opinion it's proof positive I should be carried off to weave baskets instead she puts up with it so I decided to do one in her honour. The Halifax was built round about the year of her birth so it was a suitable base kit. The airline, of course, bears her name and the tail flash of a Liver Bird speaks of her Liverpool roots. That poetic thing in the background has no significance, by the way, it just happened to be in the spot where I could crouch to get the camera angle and still have a reasonable shot at getting up again. (It came with the house). The colour scheme was a no-brainer... Blue and white for Everton. (Don't mention those red scallywags near my Moira and if you do be ready to dial 999). I'd hoped to turn the rear, belly and top turrets into observation seats but couldn't justify, even in Whiffer World, how they would be accessed so I used the optional flat covers for top and belly and the glass of the rear turret with a couple of kilos of filler at the back. The tail number, by the way, is her initials and birthday. This plane carries a crew if four, two pilot/engineer/navigators and two butlers. All pilots are retired RAF officers and all butlers retired RAF sergeants so you know they know their plane. It carries 11 in first class comfort behind the wings, everybody gets a window seat and two more in "Ultra First Class" in Air Mora's unique "Eagle's Eye" private cabin in the nose. ("Liver Bird's Eye" wouldn't have had the same zazz). Access might seem a bit tricky but, fear not, at the touch of a button the seats glide back on their tracks and rotate 90 degrees for your comfort and convenience. The breathtaking panoramic view of the Alps as you fly over will live in your memory for ever. (I gave myself a gold star for remembering to put antimacassars on the seats). I remembered to get a picture before putting the glass on. The underside. I'm ready for my close-up, Mr DeMille... So that's my tribute to my lady. Thanks for looking and I hope you liked the idea even if my execution was as usual slightly... Adjacent..

As I put the finishing touches to this FW 190 I was amazed... According to the box and the plans it was a '57 Chevy Bel Air. But seriously (as if!)... Ever since I gave Major Von Plonk his Me 109 he's been bothering me for a FW 190. He insists it must be 81 better. So I saw this kit in Aldi for a fiver and figured there was a fiver's worth of paints and a brush in the box even if I threw the kit away. And maybe I should have... Well, it has two wings and the prop seems to have more-or-less the right number of blades so I think that's enough about the finer points of detail. And besides, Von Plonk liked the plane anyway... On his first mission in it he shot down a bogey. Unfortunately it was an Me 110 that he'd mistaken for a Blenheim. I found the fit in general to be a bit... "adjacent" and the wings didn't want to cooperate at all but I got it together with judicious use of bent coat hangers, blunt instrument trauma and bad language. I was a bit alarmed while mocking up the U/C legs and finding no way to correct the somewhat pigeon-toed look but a quick blast through google images told me it's supposed to look like that. And I have to have a little rant... What evil-minded, twisted, sadistic child of Satan decided the guns and pitot should be installed before wing assembly? Five hopelessly fragile sticky-outy thingys right where one will molest them while manipulating the aircraft for further assembly and painting. Whoever that engineer is, he can buy his own pint at the pub and he's definitely off my Christmas card list. Rant over! You'll have noticed I've gone a bit off-piste with the paint job but not enough, I hope, that you'll be piste off. When I considered my chances of making the wavy demarcation line along the fuze look like it was supposed to be like that and not the drunken waverings of a freehand botch I decided a straight piece of masking tape would be the better part of valour. And the copper colour on the nose and tail was a whim since I had some left over from a Cutty Sark and thought Von Plonk, being a stylish sort of fella (known as "Flash Harry" around the officers mess), would like the look. Thanks for looking and it's onward and upward to an F 100. I must research the family tree and see if Squadron Leader A.C. Plonk also has a cousin in the US...

Hello again, lads, here's another contribution from Uncle Pete's House of Questionable Plastic Things. While perusing the Buckley Air Force a couple of months back it dawned on me Squadron Leader A.C. Plonk was getting all the action while his distant cousin in Germany, Major F. Von Plonk, had only 2 aircraft to his name (a Ju 87 and an F 104) so I thought I'd get him the German Spitfire, a good old Me 109. The build was quite uneventful and everything was going nicely, fit as good as one would expect, paint going on smoothly, masks detaching without taking any paint along for the ride but then... The mottling. It didn't look easy on the box art but on the other hand it didn't look terribly difficult. Well, only one of those conditions was met. I took it as far as the "stop trying to make it better because you're starting to make it worse" point and called it a plane. The antenna had crumbled when I attempted to cut it from the sprue so a spare U/C door found itself trimmed down and re-purposed. Size and shape are guesswork. You may have noticed something fishy about the tail wheel. I was in the process of installing it (and I'd done a lovely job of painting it, too) when it launched itself from the tweezers at Mach 2.3. I never saw it again. Given the strange physics of dropped small parts and the prevailing westerlies it could have landed anywhere between Chester and Birmingham. And that created a backstory for Major Von Plonk's 109. He'd been scrambled to intercept a squadron of American bombers and as he released the brakes his tailwheel inexplicably snapped off. "Himmel!" He snarled, "Now I vill not be able to lead mein men into battle!" (I learned fluent German from Battler Britton and Biggles stories when I was a kid). Von Plonk's faithful batman however stepped in, literally, to save the day. Obergefreiter Hans Blitzfuß was not only the best batman in the Luftwaffe, he was also the fastest sprinter. "Do not despair, Herr Major," he declared, "I can run 100 metres in 10.8 seconds. I vill carry you down ze runway!" And stuffing his body into the tail wheel well... ... Hans Blitzfuß saved the day. The mission was quite successful and Von Plonk shot down a B 25. Unfortunately, however, the pilot was this guy...

Is it just me or does anybody else find a “honeymoon effect” with kits? I open a kit up and throw myself into it with great vigour, sticking and painting, painting and sticking, and the enthusiasm tails off as the kit nears completion and working on it becomes a bit of a chore while I start eyeing the pile of unbuilt kits in the stash with a new hunger. Coincidentally I’ve been divorced four times… This Wimpy languished on the bench for a month, 90% complete, 90% painted among a little heap of antennae, gun turrets, props, spinners and wheels while I couldn’t motivate myself to run it over the finish line but last week I finally got around to final assembly and touch up. It’s the 2018 Airfix with all the highly detailed but ultimately invisible interior, satisfying to make but disappointing to see vanish when the fuze was closed up. As we all like to say, though, “I know it’s in there”. Squadron Leader A.C. Plonk, VCR, MOT, SOB and bar, has been transferred from the Shepherds Bush Air Force in London to the Buckley Air Force in North Wales and is now a bomber boy. This is his current aircraft. The boarding ladder, by the way, is just leaning in place... I've yet to figure out how to attach it properly without introducing a massive and ugly blob of glue and/or positioning it too high or too low. The instructions called for painting it silver but having seen pictures of WW2 bombers with yellow ladders I thought the hi-viz had a bit more zazz. On the subject of yellow, I forgot to paint the tips of the props. Too late now, I find that difficult enough even when they're in a position where I can actually handle them. If you've seen my builds before you'll know I'm not very good at it but, dammit, I'll show them to somebody and the members here are the only people I know who are unlikely to remember a pressing appointment when they see me select "pictures" on my phone. You pros are very indulgent of my efforts and for that I thank you... Reminds me of when I was 17 and playing on bands with musicians my dad had played with in the 40s and 50s. The bomb bay and wheel bays came out not half bad. But efforts to see even the map table inside merely reveal flaws in the paint job. I know the windows are supposed to be blacked out but I thought it would look more interesting if I left them clear (alright, clearish!) I think I can say it passes the "Two Metre Test", although if you've just cleaned your glasses it might be 3 metres. And while I'm not sure an RAF crew would park it without centering the turrets and control surfaces, Squadron Leader Plonk is a casual type of guy. I also suspect, looking at the numbers, he's also a Cornish pirate... "AAR"! Now maybe I'll get around to finishing that Me 109 I started in August. Not long after I'd cut the painting handle off the pilot's bum the Wellington shouldered its way into the queue. Thanks for looking and any tips you can give me will probably be futile but I'll continue to build to the best of my limited ability. It's probably the best 1:72 Wimpy within a 50 metre radius of my house...

Well, I was building this Airfix Vampire and wasn't very impressed with the colour scheme on the box and it occurred to me, how come nobody ever painted one up as a bat? It struck me as the sort of thing that Squadron Leader A.C. Plonk of the Shepherds Bush Air Force would like. I'd hit google images and found nothing along those lines so I gave it a whack. It only looks okay from the top and I'm semi-satisfied with that angle. From the side it failed miserably so I'm not showing that! A bit of repainting (or perhaps another Vampire) is in order but although there's acres of room for improvement I think I've got the general impression happening. I don't know if it was in protest of the low quality of my work but Popsie, one of my cats, sat on it and broke the starboard u/c leg! (She's now next to the computer supervising as I make this post). I seem to remember my big brother telling me he worked on Vampires (he was an airframe fitter before remustering as a musician and becoming the the scourge of Central Band) in Australia round about 1961-ish (I was only 8 when he was posted to Oz and 10 when he came home) so I've been wanting one for a while.

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.

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?

It's been a while since I've offered anything new in the Shepherds Bush Air Force and, since I've already broke down my workshop in preparation of moving house, it will be a while longer before I can get the new Bat Cave up and running... 'Fraid cat flaps and wheelchair ramps take priority over sticking bits of vaguely plane-shaped plastic together. I'd just picked up four kits when we stumbled on the new house but managed to get 2 of them completed before folding the tent. First was the 104, a Revell if I remember correctly, that came with German, Italian and French markings. I have no reason to believe the Italian and French versions and pilots were in any way inferior but the German markings look a lot badder so I went with that. https://www.flickr.com/photos/142507118@N04/48075179077/in/dateposted-public/ Got a bit creative with the armaments, too. It came with the inevitable Sidewinders but not much else so I added a pair of Sparrows I had kicking around. After scrolling through innumerable pictures of Aims looking for suitable paint schemes I found the choices so dizzying I came to the conclusion they could be any colour I liked! https://www.flickr.com/photos/142507118@N04/48075179487/in/dateposted-public/ At first I'd been thinking of putting more weapons on it till I read up a bit and discovered the pilot basically had a choice of carrying enough fuel to reach the target or carrying enough bangy stuff to do any damage when he got there so the wingtip tanks won the argument. The build was going quite well (by my standards) until I realised the starboard fuel tank had gone on a bit squint and it was too late to fix it without major surgery so I have to be careful with camera angles. https://www.flickr.com/photos/142507118@N04/48075112428/in/dateposted-public/ And the other was an Airfix 'Stang. Having recently seen the movie "Red Tails" I really fancied the paint scheme and when I did a bit of reading and uncovered the squadron's remarkable record I thought these blokes deserve a bit of shelf space. The kit didn't come with the appropriate markings so I enlisted the help of my old friend Mr Google Images and busked it, even managing to scavenge letters out of the name "Rose Marie" that came with the kit to give a tip of the hat to the lovely missus. https://www.flickr.com/photos/142507118@N04/48075216887/in/dateposted-public/ The sides of the fuze were straightforward for lettering... There is none! Once again I dug into the spares for appropriate numbers. I dare say the font and size are off but managed to get the Moira's birthday on the side https://www.flickr.com/photos/142507118@N04/48075220352/in/dateposted-public/ The underside. https://www.flickr.com/photos/142507118@N04/48075118356/in/dateposted-public/. And a profile. https://www.flickr.com/photos/142507118@N04/48075119726/in/dateposted-public/ Thanks for looking. It may be winter before I get to build again and redesignate the SBAF as the Flintshire Air Force. (EDIT... Don't know why the pictures didn't come up but the links to Flikr work)

Little help, please... I'm in the process of seeing if Italeri's 1:72 F 104G can take a joke and wondering about the "sit". There doesn't seem to be anything in the plans calling for nose ballast and it certainly looks like it won't need any but before I close up the fuze, can anybody tell me if a typical 104 is likely to sit back on its bum? I'd hate to get it all done and dusted only to find it pointing somewhat skyward instead of nicely on all three feet but I'd rather not put the weight in if it's not necessary. Thanks in advance.