Memories of Corsair Jim I had known Jim Sullivan (Corsair Jim) for decades, both as a contributor to this project and as a friend. He jumped aboard this project with a vengeance once he discovered that I was attempting an electronic rebirth of Replica and, somewhere along the way, he introduced me to Don Jay, a former Nimrod from the Bad Old Days in SEA as well as an image collector and photographer of considerable merit. Jim and Don spent uncounted hours on the ramps and flightlines of the American East Coast chasing airplanes and remained friends long after both of them had hung up their ca ..read more

  In So Many Ways He Made It Possible The year was 1972. Jim Wogstad and I had finally gotten to the place where we were ready to spring a mutual dream of ours, the original print edition of Replica in Scale, on an unsuspecting modeling world. That first issue, known to us then and now as I/1, was a success in spite of itself, largely because we had great people helping with the project and an idea that turned out to be more than merely viable. Maybe it was luck, or maybe something else, but we had the skill sets required, and we actually managed to have a dollop of financially critical ..read more

  A Continual Rebirth The year was 1961, and Monogram had just released their 1/48th scale F4F-4 (more or less) Wildcat to the modeling world and, perhaps more importantly, to 12-year-old Phillip. It was beautifully detailed---just look at all those rivets---and had working features too, what with its folding wings and rolling wheels. In later years we came to understand that a few things had been omitted here and there, such as the fuselage windows, the entire accessory section of the engine, and there was no cockpit to speak of. Fine detail, while good for its time, was on the spar ..read more

                                               Friddell Collection via Replica in Scale A Sad Day... Let's jump straight to it.  Jim Sullivan, a friend of mine for the past fifty years, passed away yesterday after suffering a massive heart attack a few days ago. Jim was among the very first of the heavy hitters in the aviation photography community to contact Jim Wogstad and myself back in 1973, when we were struggling to birth the original print version of what was ..read more

  A Clarification and a Special Request  First and foremost, don't get overly excited about this particular installment because just this once it's not about airplanes, either real or plastic. Instead, it's a philosophical and procedural sort of thing, but I'm guessing it needs to be clarified. Way back in the way back, a number of years ago in the early days of this project, I mentioned that I didn't encourage or print the normal sorts of comments found on most internet blogs, nor did I offer a forum. There was a simple reason for doing things that way---I'd looked at other sites, r ..read more

  Old Ain't So Bad Sometimes, anyway. I mention this because I'm old, or at least older (well into my 7th decade) than I'd like to be, but I also mention it because of the perspective it offers on so many things. That's Perspective, folks, not to be confused with that other aging-associated title; Wisdom. It's a viewpoint, a way of looking at things, that we're interested in today.  Let's take a look at our hobby for just a quick minute and evaluate where we are in this Year of Our Lord 2023. We've got a bunch of new kits, and different variants of airplanes that we thought we'd neve ..read more

It's Nearly Always a Win I am, of course, referring to our hobby and, more specifically, to the building of a kit, any kit, to a reasonably high standard of finish. In many respects I'm the wrong guy to be talking about that sort of thing since I'm a middle-of-the-road sort of modeler at best, but we can learn lessons even in mediocrity and the recent eating of my lunch by a relatively new and high-end kit provided the reflection required to cause pontification regarding the subject---that means let's talk about it for a minute or two. That most recent obstruction in the perfidious path to po ..read more

  A Different Approach Here we are, and we're late again! The handful of readers who have been with us since that very first electronic issue back in 2010 have watched a steady trend with the project, which has declined from a heady 79 issues in that first year to just a handful, erratically published. The reasons for that are many but at the end of the day don't matter very much; the point is that a title much-beloved by your editor has been gradually fading into oblivion.  That's a bad thing in our view, a very bad thing indeed, and it's time to do something about it! Here is the f ..read more

  Another One Gone I first began going to Kings Hobby Shop in Austin some 18 years ago. The place was a revelation for a great many reasons but, as with most good hobby shops, the real treasure there had nothing to do with what was on the shelves, as impressive as that was. Nope, the thing that made Kings a special place was the people, from the owner and staff right down to the customers. It was a hard-core scale modeling sort of shop and the place to go if you were serious about the hobby. The vibe was a good one, with lots of friendly people on both sides of the counter. It was easy t ..read more

Can You Really DO That? Scale modeling is one of those evolutions that we progress with throughout our lives, or at least those of us who stay with the hobby for any length of time do. That evolution gives us the opportunity to see what others do with the hobby and how they do it and, if we're lucky, allows us to grow as modelers. I'd like to share an example of that with you today. Two years of my collegiate career involved working part time at a local hobby shop in San Antonio which in turn led to meeting, and in many instances becoming friends with, a number of highly talented individuals ..read more