Stall being set out

This blog is going to be about some scale modelling projects that I've been working on recently. The subjects will be aircraft that you would reasonably expect to see finished in PC10, and they are most likely to be in 1/72nd scale. Until now they've been Sopwiths, including a Camel and a Snipe. And it's quite possible that I will build a ship's Camel at some point; but this causes a problem right away because then I'm going to have to finish it in PC12, aren't I? So my title is already potentially wrong. But judging by my current rate of work, this might not happen for several years, so excessive concern at this stage would be misplaced .

Actually, I've only finished two projects, and that was 10 years ago: they were, well, yes, the old Revell Camel and the Toko Snipe. I might give a bit more information on those in another post. But the point to make at the moment is that I spent a lot of time super-detailing those particular subjects and achieved quite presentable results I think. So after a gap of 10 years caused by continually moving house, I decided that my next project would be a Dolphin. When I first started thinking about this project there was a resin kit available in 1/72nd scale (I forget the make). But when I had a close look at it, I decided I could do better, so decided to build one from scratch. And that is my current project.

I am approaching this project without any special skill or tools, except a fine pair of tweezers and a big magnifying glass. Looking closely at the results so far, you could say that they demonstrate the limitations of this way of doing things, and it might have been better to use some miniature bench tools to obtain nice square cuts etc. As it is, I've made it this far without getting any two items parallel or at right angles to each other. But on the whole it's looking OK I think, and I've used one or two slightly innovative techniques that might be of interest. The most important thing is to be prepared to redo things that have come out wrong. That said, I am planning to give more thought to tools and techniques before continuing.

The next post will have a couple of pictures