Category Archives: 2. Aviation

1/48 Junkers Ju-88 C-6 Maintenance Diorama by Szabo Akos

  By Dean | August 6, 2012 - 11:00 am | ,
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I like this, it just seems well done all round. You can see more of it on the builders website www.albatros.extra.hu via the link below the photos.

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MORE PHOTOS ON THE ALBATROS WEBSITE

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Wow, This Is Just Amazing

  By Dean | June 8, 2012 - 2:00 am | ,
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This is around ten years old so there may be a lot of you who have already seen this, but I haven’t yet and I suspect many others haven’t either. This guy, Young Park, completely scratchbuilt this F4U and P-51D in 1/16 in aluminium. They even have workable controls etc. This is true modelling and is just incredibly inspiring. These are just a few of the photos, I highly recommend you check out his site HERE to see more photos and details of the builds.

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Shepard Paine’s 1/48 Monogram B-17 Flying Fortress Diorama

  By Dean | May 8, 2012 - 11:00 am | ,
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This is the third of several of Shepard Paine’s old dioramas that I’m taking a look at for nostalgia reasons ( read THIS so I don’t have to repeat it all over and over ). Ironically I ended up building all the Monogram 1/48 aircraft as I kept winning them at a local competition run by the distributor. I won the B-17 with a B-24 that was in turn won with a B-29 I received for Christmas one year that started it all.

The B-17 went on to win me a B-25 but that was the last year I entered as I moved on to girls and that was the end of modelling for 25 years. In those last couple of years I was building more armour so it’s doubtful I ever would have built these otherwise. I always liked the concept of this build as before coming across this I never would have considered the idea of deliberately trying to “wreck” a perfectly good kit. Now people do almost nothing but wrecks.

Even when you compare this kit to contemporary builds you it stands the test of time. Every time I look at it I feel like I notice new details, something new that makes me think “geez that guy had skills”.

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If you want to read a bit more about it from the man himself you can do so on his site HERE.

Diorama – Shepard Paine’s 1/48 Monogram C-47 Skytrain

  By Dean | May 1, 2012 - 6:00 pm | ,
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I’ve decided to take a bit of a walk down memory lane and look at some of the works by Shepard Paine over the next few weeks, mainly because these were the works that most inspired me as a young modeller in my teens. These are what got me building dioramas and I used to love the printed booklet that came with each of the kits showing these dioramas and how they were built. I think with that one small marketing move Monogram must have done endless good for the hobby.

Looking at them now I know that many of them these days would just blend in with the masses but when you consider the end result not just working with a kit that now is some 30 odd years old but with the constraint that these were built for Monogram on a tight time budget and with the proviso that he could only use Monogram kits then to me they are still inspirational.

Almost all of these I tried to mimic at some point when I was in my mid teens, and this one is no exception. I think this one stood out at the time as it would have been done around the time that the movie A Bridge Too Far was out and that movie ( and the book as well ) were, and still are favourites of mine.

I don’t have many recollections of the kit, in those days how accurate and how much detail weren’t something you gave that much thought to. But I do remember painstakingly masking the D-Day stripes to get straight edges only to years later watch a documentary with period footage of a guy applying the white over the black using a broom with not a straight edge anywhere to be seen.

So it’s possible that this diorama still warms my heart as much because it brings back memories of a young modeller just starting out as it does because of the scene itself. Either way it’s still one of my all time favourites.

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If you want to read a bit more about it from the man himself you can do so on his site HERE.