David Grigg and Perry Middlemiss do a fine podcast called Two Chairmen Talking which is about what they’ve been reading and watching recently, mostly science fiction or stuff related to it.  Back in Episode 5 there is about half an hour of me being interviewed about history and the history of Australian sf fandom I’ll get back to next year.  So if you want to listen to it, try here:

Episode 5: An Incomplete History of Serious Events

Our annual expedition to Expo has become something of a tradition.  I suppose I could find out when it started if I were to go back through MoB newsletters but, as a guess I’d say it was some time in the 19^th Century, it seems to be so long ago.

It always happens the same way for me.  Master Mark pulls up outside my place, I put a bag of kits that I’ve fallen out of love with into the car and climb in.  Master Mark is always the driver, Master Wayne is his navigator (or interested observer when things don’t go right), Master Mick sits behind Wayne and I fill the vacant space.  And away we go.  Mark has always picked something interesting for us to listen to, most memorably was the year we had old American radio serials including The Shadow (who knows).  Customarily Mark also provides me with a book on the life and saying of the great Greek philosopher Pythagoras because he feels I need that kind of help as I am going to Expo with the intention of buying and selling.  Thus equipped we seem to reach Sandown in a only a few minutes.

Things did not go that way this year and discombobulated me right from the start and where I stayed for the rest of the day.  Having sold off quite a lot of my unwanted stuff at our display day I didn’t have much of interest to put on our sellers table at the Expo swap n smell but, nevertheless, I had a bag to go into the car.  But when I got in there was no Master Mick who had called in sick at the last minute.  This was disturbing enough but then I discovered there was no Pythagoras to read to put me in the right frame of mind for the day.  Instead, I had to gaze out the window at the world outside.  It was wet and miserable, and even more miserable when we got to Melbourne.  ‘How do people live here happily?’, I asked myself.  The answer is, of course, that we keep Ballarat a closely guarded secret.

The trip became even more disturbing when Master Mark announced that he had devised a new route to get to Expo, more direct apparently without the optional extras of visiting unsuspecting car parks in the middle of suburbia.  And this was so.  We got off the freeway and headed up one of the suburban main roads until, without any confusion or drama, we arrived at the turn off to the Sandown racecourse.

It was raining when we got there.   Usually there is a long queue of sellers with their bags and boxes lined up across the car park, chatting and comparing their wares.  This year we all headed for a covered area upstairs and huddled in a state of semi-confusion waiting to be let into the hall.  As a result there was less of the usual convivial banter that sets the tone for the day.  Then, the biggest blow to my equilibrium, the swap n smell had been moved into a different hall – a bigger and more commodious one with plenty of space for people to walk around without the overcrowding we experienced in the previous room.

It is a step in the right direction as far as Expo is concerned, really, but it put me right off my game.  It had been a morning devoted to confronting me with the unexpected, one or two changes can be invigorating but not a cascade of them!

This year Wayne and I put our small collection of surplus kits on our table and set off in search of new kits to fall in love with.  I had a short list of things I might be interested in and saw none of them.  I did manage to pick up another Revell A.310 for a mere $10, and a couple of other things, but overall the kits on offer seemed to be all the usual stuff that we’ve seen at swap and sells these past decade.  Either I’m a jaded old modeller or the events of the previous couple of hours had disabled my enthusiasm, I looked over pile after pile of pre-loved kits with little of the interest and excitement I’ve had in previous years.  I hope I’m not jaded, I’d like to think that the events of the day had just put me off my game.

Perhaps the prices that sellers are asking for their kits has something to do with it.  Master Wayne, who is a student of such things, tells me that these days many of the prices he saw were comparable with the prices of new kits.  All I know is that I was so desperate enough to buy something that I was tempted by a kit of a Citroen CV2 but when I looked at the selling price I put the kit back on the pile again.  True, I did pay about the same price for a kit of the Boeing Stratoliner that I found later on, but one was the kit of an interesting airliner, and the other wasn’t.

Eventually the hall was thrown open to the great unwashed masses and they swarmed in.  In this new, bigger hall, it took a while for them to work their way up to our far end, but eventually they made it to our area.  Boy, there was a lot of them.  It was crowded, not as thickly as in previous years but still enough that you had to barge your way through the crowd if you wanted to get anywhere.  I’m told that the reduced population density also reduced the offense caused by some modeller’s lack of experience with hygiene products, it certainly wasn’t as pungent on our side of the table as it has been on some earlier visits.

Also evident was a lack of interest in most of the stuff on our table.  Buyers would come to our table, fumble listlessly through our piles and move on.  We both sold a few things but it seemed to us that most buyers didn’t know what they wanted and were just looking for some inspiration.  I thought some of our kits were bargains and I reckon that if you can’t find inspiration in a nice resin kit of an A.310 you are having difficulties with life.  There were some people wandering around with piles of kits under their arms or in bags they had thoughtfully brought with them.  Some had wives or girlfriends with them who looked intensely uninterested in proceedings (perhaps they were there to supervise their male’s spending).

After about an hour and a half of this listlessness we packed up our stuff.  This is the first time in years that the volume of what I purchased was more than the volume of what I sold so my bag was bigger on the way out than on the way in.  Well, the Stratoliner and A.310 did come in big boxes.  (You may have noted that I had an A.310 for sale and bought another one, which is an interesting tale I might get around to one of these days.)

Expo downstairs was pretty much as it has been every other time we’ve been there.  There are people selling stuff around the edges of the hall and models on display in the centre, some of them in the competition and some of them in club displays.  I heard later that there had been over 800 models entered in competitions and there were, as usual, over 100 trophies to be handed out, so a lot of people were to go home happy, if you like that kind of things.  I personally enjoy the club displays more than the competition models.  True, all of the work put into making models makes we wonder if we could not instead achieve world peace if we put as much effort into that project as we do into making models.  On the other hand, perhaps making models is a kind of contribution to world peace, in its own way.

One of the club displays was on the theme of flying boats and there were some beauties, including the Amodel 1/72 Martin Mars which confirmed me in my desire to acquire one.  On the other side of the aisle was another club display which included an immense 1/72 kit of a Saro Princess (1950s flying boat airliner), partly stuck together with tape which captivated me.  Had there been a kit of it available then and there I would have whipped out my credit card.  Fortunately it was not, and I have since calmed down a little and a modicum of reason has returned.  Still, I did order a kit of the Martin Mars on the interweb and that is quite big, so I might have scratched that itch enough for the moment.

In my wanders around Expo I said hello to a few people, Wayne and I chatted to Frank Morgan and I had a talk with Peter of Hawkeye Models who sold me some more decal sheets of Australian airliners.  Somehow, however, I felt overwhelmed by Expo, it was either too big to take in or lacking something to attract my distracted frame of mind.  So, when Wayne and Mark and I decided it was time to head back to the civilization that is Ballarat, I was happy to leave.

Another tradition of our trip has been to stop for a late lunch at a large service station and eatorama on the highway near Rockbank.  We did it again, and discovered that it had been invaded by hoards of leather lunged school children.  The noise was deafening.  ‘So, what did we think of the day?’ asked Master Mark, yelling to make himself heard.  I thought about it.  As usual I had enjoyed spending the day with good friends, but I had not felt any of the enjoyment at what we had seen or done that I had in earlier years.  ‘Discombulated’, was all I could think of to say.

I reckon it might be fifty years or more since I went to the MCG to watch a game of footy. Not that footy isn’t interesting, just that there were other more interesting things to do on the weekend during that time or we weren’t living in Melbourne or the Melbourne Football Club team was doing so poorly that it would be painful to go and watch.

My sister’s son-in-law, Mick, and I have chatted idly about going to see a Carlton (his team) and Melbourne (my team) match one day and eventually we got around to arranging it. Since both teams are languishing towards the bottom of the league ladder it seemed likely to be a fairly even, if untidy, game.

The first part of the trip to the MCG was from Ballarat to Melbourne. As part of the government’s policy of making things uncomfortable as possible the train service was replaced by road coaches for the day, which made the trip to Melbourne more cramped and uncomfortable than usual. There were a lot of people on the coach wearing Carlton colours, which seemed ominous. We met at one of the foodaramas near the station and had bite to eat. There were even more people in Carlton colours there, and a few in Melbourne colours, so I guess that a lot of people travel down from regional Victoria for the footy and meet there before going to the ground.

If the match is at the Docklands stadium then it would only be a short stroll to the ground, but since it was at the MCG it meant going back to the station and catching a suburban train to Richmond, the closest station to the ground. I’m not a great fan of crowds these days so seeing all those people headed en-masse to the ground was somewhat startling, and while there was a large crowd milling around the entrances the staff handled the security checks with admirable efficiency. (Towards the end of the match they announced the crowd attendance of over 55,000, about half the population of Ballarat.)

It was a Carlton home match, I discovered, so I found myself at the end of the ground where Carlton supporters had gathered. Not that it seemed to matter much, there was a goodly supply of Melbourne fans in the crowd too. There has been a lot of chatter in the press of late about bad crowd behavior but I saw none of that as we sat and waited for the game to commence, just a lot of chatter among supporters on both sides.

The game itself was not of the highest quality, both teams are low on the premiership league ladder and the skills on display reflected this. The current habit of teams like this is to kick the ball across the ground in the hope of getting towards a scoring position rather than going right up the center of the ground, and it is a very annoying habit, as some barrackers in the crowd reminded the players.

I didn’t mind this for the first three quarters as the Melbourne team gradually built up a very useful lead of 38 points. But in the final quarter they seemed to have forgotten how to play the game and almost all the quarter was played in the Carlton scoring half of the ground with the result that that team hit the front with only a few minutes left to play. Fortunately Melbourne scored one goad in the quarter which was enough to see the team fall over the line at the end of the game.

There was a great deal of yelling and screaming as Carlton surged in that final quarter, if the MCG had a roof it would have been lifted. At the end of the game, however, Carlton supporters, who have become used to their team losing my small margins, and Melbourne supporters, who have become used to seeing their team play poorly, began chatting again and everyone filed out, if not happily at least content that they had seen what proved to be a fairly even match.

What did I think? I thought it interesting and diverting, but not something that I would want to do every weekend for half a year, as hundreds of thousands of fans seem to do. I might go again in the coming fifty years too.

After the success of the Fokker F-27 Friendship, the Fokker company next developed the F-28 Fellowship, a medium jet airliner that gave greater speed and range than the F-27 but was still smaller and cheaper than other jet airliners of the time such as the Douglas DC-9 and BAC 1-11.  F-28s did very well in Australia because the niche they filled, suited the longer and thinner routes of rural New South Wales and outback Western Australia.  They began arriving in Australia in the early 1970s with MacRobertson Miller Airlines being the first to fly them, in Western Australia.  Other major operators were Airlines of New South Wales and East West Airline in New South Wales, and the Department of Civil Aviation (later the Department of Transport and later again the Department of Aviation) which flew three, mainly to give Departmental staff flying time on jets and to test Australia’s radio navigation aids.

The F-28 came in three versions, the F-28-1000 with capacity for 70 passengers, of which 10 were registered in Australia, the F-28-3000 with increased wing span and greater range, of which three were registered in Australia, and the F-28-4000 which also had an extended fuselage and a capacity of 85 passengers, of which 12 were registered in Australia.

Making models of the F-28 is not easy.  There was an ancient American Airliners kit made many decades ago which is best consigned to the scrap bin of history.  More recently there has been the F-Rsin Plastic injection molded version and the Authentic Airliners full resin version, both kits coming in both the -1000 and -4000 versions.  The F-Rsin kit is a fairly dreadful thing, generally poorly cast and difficult to assemble. Looking at it with the benefit of hindsight, I’d reckon that F-Rsin have taken a Revell Fokker 100 kit and modified it a bit to become a F-28.  The end result is hardly worth the money paid, but it is the only game in town unless you are willing to pay for the much more expensive Authentic Airliners kit, which is a dream to assemble.

I started off with the F-Rsin F-28-1000 which I finished as one flown by MMA, using Hawkeye decals.  I was so disgusted by the quality of this kit that I threw my F-Rsin F-28-4000 in the bin and ordered the Authentic Airliners kit instead.  It was a pleasure to build, with the exception of the undercarriage legs which were so thin and fragile that they both snapped.  The only thing to do was to dive into my rubbish bin and retrieve the legs from the F-Rsin kit which may be deformed but at least hold the model off the ground in a reasonably realistic fashion.  This model was completed in the livery of Airlines of Western Australia, provided by an ancient Jet Set decal sheet which was showing its age, but the only one every printed for that airline.

I did give some thought to making a third F-28, this time in the livery of the Department of Transport, which I flew in a couple of times.  It would not be beyond my limited skills to make one, but the expense of having to buy another Authentic Airliners kit (and probably a F-Rsin one too for the undercarriage) made me think otherwise.  Besides, there were Revell Fokker 100s now wanting to be built.

A further development was the F-28-0100, which was marketed as the Fokker 100.  It had new, more powerful engines, a stretched fuselage that typically accommodated 107 passengers, improved wings for greater efficiency and other improvements.  When production of the Fokker 100 started 1988 it was virtually the only airliner in its class but by the mid 1990s several competitor airliners had entered the market and it became less attractive to airliners so sales fell.  As a result, only 283 had been delivered when Fokker went bankrupt in 1996.  The Fokker 100 was popular in Australia and as F-28s were taken out of service they were replaced by Fokker 100s and eventually 27 were registered in Australia, flying mainly with Skywest, now Virgin Australia, and Alliance.

Unlike the F-28, the Fokker 100 is well represented in plastic, though only by one kit.  Revell’s 1/144 Fokker 100 has all the attributes that kits of the F-28 don’t; it is easy to put together and relatively inexpensive.  (It is out of production at the moment so you will have to find copies on the interweb or at your local friendly swap n sell.)  I would warn you about any problems in building this kit but, frankly, I can’t think of any.

Aftermarket decals for the 1/144 Fokker 100 are fairly common, but not ones for those flying in the Australian region.  The only two I know of are the Southern Skies decals made for the Skywest livery and Ric Warcup decals for the Air Niugini livery.  It seems that the Skywest decals are now out of print but Ric Warcup seems to print copies of his decals when they are ordered so you should be able to get the Air Niugini decals relatively easily.  Alliance and Norfolk Air also flew Fokker 100s in Australia but I don’t know of any decals available for them.

The only challenge most modelers will face in building this kit is getting a presentable white finish, a necessary skill because almost the entire airframe is white.  My way of achieving this is to make sure the surface of the model ready for painting is absolutely smooth, which means a thorough going over with wet and dry paper of no more than 400 grit.  Then a coat or two of Tamiya white primer, followed by a light sanding with about 6000 grit micromesh.  Then three coats of white acrylic lacquer which I bought at my local automotive paint shop, another light sanding with 12000 grit micromesh and then two coats of Tamiya rattle can pure white.  What can go wrong?

A final note.  Fokker also made a shorter version of the Fokker 100 called the Fokker 70.  A model of this can be made relatively easily by shortening the fuselage of a Revell 1/144 Fokker kit or buying the Welsh Models conversion kit, which is basically a shorter fuselage.  As the process of converting the Revell fuselage will entail cutting out sections before and aft of the wings, and this takes a fair bit of calculating and careful cutting to get right, I’ve bought the Welsh Models conversion kit.  So far as I can find out, only Alliance had flown the Fokker 70 in Australia, so if I’m going to make one of these I’ll have to improve my decal making skills, which I don’t appear to have done much to improve recently.  Never mind, just in case I become a decal making genius one of these days I’m on the hunt for two more Revell 1/144 Fokker 100 kits.  We can only dream.

We begin this month with a couple of Airbus A300s, the same airliner but in two different liveries. The first is of the first A300 delivered to TAA in 1981 in a new livery designed for the introduction of the A300s to Australian service. Unfortunately for TAA there was a severe downturn in passenger demand around the time of its delivery, rather than the growth that the airline had expected, so the A300s proved to be a near fatal disaster for TAA. To save the situation some of the airline’s A300s had their delivery delayed and others were leased. One of them was VH-TAA which leased to Condor in Germany for a few months and then to Air Niugini for the rest of the 1980s.

The kit used for these models is the venerable Airfix 1/144 kit, which was first published in 1974. It has not been re-released since the early 2000s but copies are still often available from sites such as ebay. Overall is it a good solid kit but nothing special. It has, for example, fine raised detain on the wings and no detail worth speaking of on the fuselage. This would give those who like scribing and re-scribing panel lines a serious workout of their skills. Fortunately for me, I had the Liveries Unlimited corogard wing panels decals instead, which took away the need for any such effort.

First, this Airbus A300 as it appeared when it arrived in Australia in 1981 and flew as until 1984. The decals are from Hawkeye and contain a serious error in that the windows do not slant upwards at the rear of the passenger cabin as they should. The work involved in modifying the decals to represent this major feature in the A300 would have been extremely difficult so I did not attempt it. Instead, please pretend that I said nothing.

The decals for VH-TAA when it flew for Air Niugini between 1984 and 1989 with the registration of P2-ANG, also come from Hawkeye. The decals for the ‘Bird of Prey’ scheme come in one complete section for each side and I could only imagine that you were supposed to apply them before attaching the model’s wings first. I took a different approach and cut the decals into three parts as carefully as I could; the upper section, the lower section and the head. Attaching the upper decals first allowed me to line them up fairly well and gave me a guide as to where to place the underside decals and the heads. Applying the decals required a fair bit of patience but turned out better than I expected.

Next is another Revell 1/144 Fokker 100. This model was made more or less straight out of the box with the addition of Ric Warcup decals to portray an Air Niugini one, P2-ANQ which may be, for all that I know, still flying.

And here are three that I made earlier.

The Douglas P-70 was a night fighter version of the well used Douglas A-20, or Boston as it was called when it served with the RAF. The kit is as ancient as my Airbus kits, being released by Revell in 1975, and a variation on their A-20C Havoc kit released in 1967. For all that I found it a much more modern feeling kit than the Airfix Airbus kits with a much better feeling for detail. The matt black finish makes this kit an easy one to paint, but I did increase the level of difficulty by making new radar aerials from stretched sprue to replace the parts in the kit.

If my memory serves me right the Hindustan Aeronautics HF-24 Marut was the final design of the legendary German designer, Kurt Tank. I think it is a particularly attractive aircraft so when I stumbled across this Model Alliance 1/72 resin kit I snapped it up. It turned out to be a challenging little kit to make and there is a lot of filler hidden beneath this model’s nice polished metal finish. Because of this difficulty I might not have finished this model, had it not promised to look so delightful when it was completed.

Finally for this month, the 1/72 Heller Dassault Mirage IV. I have never seen one of these aeroplanes live but I imagine it would be a striking sight with size combined with Dassault delta elegance, This kit was released in 1979 when Heller were producing some of the best kits of those times, and still some of the best quality kits ever, in my opinion. This Mirage IV kit is an excellent example of the company’s craft and has been released several times more recently. I’ve got another one stored up so I can make it in bare metal livery. It will be beautiful.

Yesterday I went to Booktown Clunes which is a huge orgy of book selling and buying. If you haven’t heard of it, it’s worth finding out about on the www. Despite the manifest temptations I bought only three books, and worthy tomes they are too, none of your paperback rubbish.

My main reason for going to this event was to attend the launch of a new academic history journal titled Before/Now. It is put together by the post-graduates of the Collaborative Research Center in Australian History at Federation University, of which I am an honorary research fellow. It is a long time since I’ve been a post-graduate but, following a bit of enthusiastic encouragement, I was persuaded to write something for it, which I did. Consequently I felt it might be a good idea to go to the launch.

It turned out to be a very pleasant event with the usual glass of plonque in one hand and a copy of the journal in the other. You would have enjoyed yourself.

So here is the first issue of Before/Now, with my article on the construction of the stone gaol at Bendigo in it. There is a lot more good stuff in this inaugural issue, as you can see from the title page. Post-graduate students these days are a lot better than I was when I was one of them and a quick read of some of the articles makes me envious of their abilities.

A copy will cost you $20 and you can get a copy from the Center: CRCHA, PO Box 663, Ballarat, 3353.

I don’t know about other scale modellers, but the first few models I made, Airfix, Frog and Revell, went unpainted. It was enough for me to have the bare plastic with the simple decals the kit provided stuck on them. Then I took to reading the kit instructions more carefully and found the painting instructions too. Those first colour instructions were quite simple and left a lot to the imagination of this young modeller.

The local hardware shop sold small tins of paint for less than a shilling, shiny enamel stuff that took the best part of a day to dry. Over a year of so I built up a small collection of them; a green, a blue and a brown, and black and white to make all shades of grey. The color instructions in the kits were not every specific and I wasn’t either. If the kit instructions said to use green, blue and grey, I had everything I needed.

At some stage I discovered scale modelling magazines, in particular Airfix Magazine, which started to open my eyes to the varieties of aircraft colours. I also read about this thing called Humbrol paint, but it was not until I was in Melbourne one time and went to Melbourne Sports Depot where I saw the Humbrol tinlets for the first time. They were might attractive and I was keen to get some, but at two shillings a tinlet, I couldn’t afford them, and had to continue using my existing supply of house paint.

A few years later I was living in Melbourne and earning enough to be able to buy some of these Humbrol paints. As I recall, Airfix and Heller had their own line of paint, and Revell still does, but Humbrol had started producing paint in ‘camouflage’ colours, coinciding with a growing awareness of the complexities of painting aeroplanes in accurate colours. The advent of the American magazines like Scale Modeler with their full colour interior pages also emphasized the somewhat novel fact that the Germans and British did not use the same hues of green and grey on their aeroplanes during the Battle of Britain.

Humbrol paint was designed to be brush painted and that’s what most modellers did. However, I began reading about these things called ‘airbrushes’ and they started appearing in the model shops like Hearns Hobbies and Model Dockyard. Still, they were very expensive and it was not until a friend and I got royalties for a play we’d sold that I could afford one. It did not take me long to learn that I needed a compressor too, which was almost as expensive as the airbrush had been.

Thus began the long relationship that I’ve had with Humbrol paints sprayed through an airbrush. The only innovation to this was the discovery, probably in the 1980s but I could not be sure, of the range of American Modelmaster enamels in their little glass bottles which seemed to have an even greater range of ‘authentic’ colours than Humbrol. One of the great advantages of Modelmaster paints were that they came in screw top bottles and were therefore easier to use and keep sealed than the Humbrol tinlets. So, over the following years and decades I built up quite a collection of Humbrol and Modelmaster paints, supplemented by Metalizer and later Alclad II metallic paints.

Life went on happily for a long time until, only a year or two ago, I discovered that Modelmaster enamels were no longer available in Australia. I didn’t read anything or hear anything, they just stopped being available in shops and on Australian websites. This would not have been a problem except that, being enamels, it became impossible to import them from shops overseas. At the same time, the quality of Humbrol paint had declined dramatically so that suddenly I found the enamel paints I was so used to using were no longer available or useable.

Talking to some members of the local scale modelling club it emerged that they were using these new, to me, acrylic paints. The models they were putting on the table at the monthly meetings looked pretty good to me so, on one of our trips down to the model shops of Melbourne, I bought a few sets of these paints. Some of them were okay and some of them were so thin that they came out of my airbrush as though they were coloured water – which is what they were in reality. This led me to invest in new airbrushes to cope with this new watery paint and I now have three Badger airbrushes, each one with a smaller needle than the one to try to control the problem of this runny paint run everywhere. I also experimented with various brands of acrylic paint and found some that suited me better than others.

The other problem I had with these new acrylic paints was that most of them were so thin that it was possible to brush paint them to touch up any blemishes. I still had my enamels to do that, but of course most paint makers have slightly different ideas of what RLM 02, for example, actually looks like, so using them on acrylic paints was fraught with unhappiness. There was also the increasing probability that mixing enamel and acrylic paint with Gloscote and Dulcote top coats, which are lacquers, would end up in one of those crinkly finishes that bedevil so much model making in the final stages of construction.

As a result of all this, I was not enjoying my model making. I could complete the perfect model but I felt no sense of safety as I approached my paint booth. How would the acrylics go this time, how would the touch up go and what would be the chemical reaction from a mix of different kinds of paints? After one particularly disappointing visit to the my paint booth where the yellow paint ran everywhere and puddled, creating a dreadful result, I threw all my acrylic paint into the bin lest I be tempted to use it again.

Fortunately for me, lacquer paints had began appearing in camouflage colours. I already knew about lacquers from my discovery of them as the solution to the big problem of using enamel paint on airliners. White had become the predominant colour of airliners but white enamels do not give an ideal airliner quality finish and, to make matters worse, they go yellow over time. The solution that was suggested to me what Tamiya Pure White lacquer which was available in rattle cans. It took me a while to get used to this new paint and I finally solved the problem of the paint going everywhere out of the rattle can by finding out how to decant the paint into a bottle and then spray it through one of my airbrushes, the Badger Patriot being ideal for the job.

I also had some experience with camouflage lacquers with the MRP and SBS ranges. They did not please me, however, being as thin as acrylic paints and therefore having one of the problems that had annoyed me so much with acrylics. However, at around the time that I threw out all my acrylic paint AK Interactive ‘Real Color’ lacquer paint started becoming available in Australia. To start with I bought one of their sets for US Navy aircraft and, at the same time, I saw that Hataka had released a set of French camouflage lacquer paints, probably the same colours as their French camouflage acrylic range that I’d bought, tried and thrown in the bin. Thus armed I set out on a new adventure.

First off was the RS Models Bloch 151, a little fighter of dubious quality during the Battle of France but a nice little kit. As an experiment I primed it in MRP black primer. Using black primer seems to be all the rage these days so I thought I’d give it a go. While I feared that the Hataka lacquers would be too thin this proved not to be the case. Straight from the dropper bottle into the paint cup of my Badger Xtreme Patriot the paint went on exceptionally smoothly and gave good coverage over the black primer with the first coat, and excellent coverage with two coats. Even the light blue underside sprayed over black primer required only two coats, and the second one was really only for insurance.

Next came the big test, how would the Hataka lacquer paint go with hand painting. The upper colours of green and brown on this model could not be airbrushed (not with my limited skills anyhow) so I had to hand paint them instead. I’d found that hand brushing acrylics over an earlier painted surface often led to tears so I was apprehensive with the lacquers, but I experienced no problems at all. Not only that, the finish of these lacquer paints was smooth and glossy so there was no need to apply a gloss top coat before applying the decals. After that, all I needed was a single overcoat of Tamiya matt varnish, and the end result was a nice looking little model. Having been emboldened I moved on to make the RS Models Bloch 152, which is quite similar to the 151. The results were the same and I was converted to these new paints.

The other test I needed to run was of the AK Interactive ‘Real Color’ lacquers. They come in little glass bottles quite like Tamiya paints and are, when you open the bottle and give them a stir, quite thick in comparison to almost all other paints I’ve bought in the past decade. I had the Eduard F6F-5 that I wanted to use in the standard late was USN Deep Sea Blue scheme. AK call it Dark Sea Blue and, to my eye, it is a little too grey, but AK say that theirs is the most accurate range of colours ever produced, and I’m willing to trust them, a little. For the first time in a long time, I had to thin this paint to go through my airbrush, about 2/3 paint and 1/3 thinner seemed just about right for my Badger Patriot and I applied the second coat just to make sure that I had got complete coverage with the first coat. Again, the finish was perfectly smooth and lightly gloss, so there was no need for a gloss coat for decaling.

What sold me on these paints was that all the touching up was done with an ordinary paint brush and that many of the little details; oleos, guns, propeller blades and tips and wheels, were all hand painted successfully using AK lacquers. I’m converted and I’m now looking at websites to see what other AK and Hataka lacquers I can buy to return the painting pleasure to my modeling.