22 Eins Zwei Drei
Gaspatch Model’s New 1/
Henschel Hs123 by Jay Blakemore82 The Electric Man
Airfix 1/72 Savoia Marchetti S.79 Sparviero
Serie II Bomber by Stephen J Di NucciA
nother year over, and
where did 2017 go! I
am sure as I get older
that time moves faster!
It seems like only yesterday that
I was building the Matchbox F-5A
in its blue and white plastic, and an
Airfix Mosquito that came in a box,
not a clear bag from Woolworths. If
my memory serves me correctly, I
remember buying the Matchbox kit
for £2 when it first appeared in my
local hobby shop. While many will
bemoan the price of modern plastic
kits, if you think about it, that
£2, with inflation, would now be
the equivalent of £25. And unlike
Mars bars, which have shrunk to
what seems to be (at most) half
their original size, look what we
can get for £25 today. Airfix have
released a beautiful kit of a P-
Tomahawk in 1/72 scale for under£8, and their superb state-of-the-
art 1/48 scale P-51 is only £22.
Back in the 1970s, the Czech
Republic was behind the iron
curtain, but even then they
produced some interesting subjects
(including the most accurate
Mig-15 available for many years).
Though these were not as good as
western manufacturers, they could
occasionally be bought for a couple
of pounds. Now, for under £16 you
can purchase an Eduard Spitfire,
including etched brass (still many
years away in 1975), and decals that
are of a quality we would never
have believed possible back then.
In 2018 we will be in a whole
new golden age of plastic
modelling, with quality kits that
far eclipse anything available in
my youth, and some that will, I am
sure, raise the bar even higher. Butone thing that has not changed
is that I will still be mucking kits
up just as easily today as I did
back in my youth. Ok, the days of
applying the decals to the bare
plastic and then painting around
them with a stick may be long
gone (I know, but it made sense
at the time). Instead, I am now
airbrushing my latest project
with airbrush cleaner!!! Shows
that despite all those years of
practice, and even though you can
teach an old dog some new tricks,
really clever old dogs will still
come up with new and even more
catastrophic ways to muck it up.
Therefore, goodbye to 2017,
and I must say that (despite my
modelling mistakes), I was very
fortunate to work with some very
talented modellers and production
staff who have made producingthis title a sheer joy. So, I would like
to take this opportunity to wish our
readers and the whole SAMi team
a very Happy New Year, and I hope
in the year ahead all your mistakes
are small ones. Now where is
that wet-and-dry sandpaper?David Francis, Editor
[email protected]Subscribe
see page 804 • JANUARY 2018 • SCALE AVIATION MODELLER INTERNATIONAL
WELCOME
Scale Aviation Modeller International
January 2018 • Volume 24 • Issue 1004-05-Contents-0118.indd 4 08/12/2017 16: