Post by Dave Homewood on Sept 11, 2009 23:50:47 GMT 12
The world war in my bedroom: As a new book celebrates the (very fiddly) joys of Airfix, Michael Hanlon lovingly re-assembles his own memories
By Michael Hanlon
Last updated at 1:07 PM on 25th August 2009
The paint, in the end, was what divided the men from the boys - the modellers from those who just wanted to play with their planes.
For me, this sort of artistry was a step in skill too far. I could stick a toy Spitfire together in an afternoon - the result would even vaguely resemble designer R.J. Mitchell's beautiful warbird in outline - but paint it properly? No way.
Not for want of trying. After all, I bought the little tins of Humbrol enamel - the names resonate to this day: 'duck egg blue', 'camouflage green (matt)' - the brushes and the thinners.
But the result was always the same - a discordant, multi-coloured mess. And that was before trying to apply the decals - flimsy transfers which usually ended up stuck to your skin rather than on the wings or fuselage.
Inevitably, there would be more enamel on the dining table, on my hands and in my hair than on the plastic plane. Clearing everything up took me - or more usually my mother - far more time than assembling the actual aircraft.
Not every little boy built - and tried to paint - Airfix kits in those days, but the experience was as necessary a part of growing up as learning to tie one's shoelaces or riding a bike without stabilisers.
Building an aircraft out of dozens of pieces of flimsy injection-moulded plastic requires patience, character and a modicum of skill. Which might have been good for us.
Look at the populations of today's prisons and madhouses and you will find young men for whom the experience of assembling the undercarriage of a Wellington Bomber is an unknown pleasure, men for whom 'duck egg blue' is a mere abstraction and people who have never lusted after a Messerschmitt in a massive 1:24 scale.
Now a new book, by an expert on every kit Airfix ever launched (its first, by the way, was not for a plane, but for a Ferguson tractor) tells the story of the 'toy' that turns British boys into decent British chaps.
'Airliners were seductive but unsatisfying'
//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
I can remember my first Airfix kit, given to me when I was about six or seven.
It was a 1:72 model of a Lockheed F-104 Starfighter, a glamorous, pointynosed supersonic American jet combat aircraft. The Starfighter, I found out later, was so dangerous (for your own side, not the enemy) in real life that it was called the Flying Coffin.
I remember opening the box and the racks of polystyrene parts came tumbling out. I was too young to follow the instructions on my own, but with a bit of adult help, I managed to produce something roughly resembling a miniature version of a real plane.
Airfix was the Ikea of toys - you had to put it together yourself and sometimes the kit came with bits missing. But unlike an Ikea bookcase, building an Airfix kit was always extremely enjoyable. And the instructions were always in English.
As a result, I was soon hurtling into the whole Airfix experience. I was never terribly good at making the models, but that was not the point - it was the doing and the trying that mattered.
Airfix kits were cheap - they still are. You could get a 1:72 WWII aircraft for about 50p in the 1970s, a week's pocket money; a big airliner would cost rather more. Then there were the Superkits, more of which later, after which we all lusted.
It became clear that there were good kits and bad kits. Airliners were seductive - they had swooping streamlined curves and few parts to befuddle - but they were, in the end, rather unsatisfying.
They were just too simple, and everything slotted together too neatly. The only fiddly bits were the cabin windows, which came as a strip of clear polystyrene to be inserted from the inside. Inevitably, they got smeared with glue.
Indeed, even if you constructed the airliners properly, they just ended up looking like the clunky promotional models you saw in travel agents' windows.
The best kits tended, of course, to be World War II aircraft: Spitfires, Hurricanes and their German (and Japanese) equivalents. For us small boys in the 1970s, WWII was still in full swing, and our model planes allowed us to indulge our Nazi-bashing fantasies to the full.
I often wondered what German boys would have thought of this - and whether they made Airfix squadrons of their own. It turns out that they did, but under post-war German law, any depiction of the swastika or other Nazi insignia was banned.
Indeed, kits exported to Germany had to have these markings missing - and they were carefully removed by a censor at the Airfix export depot.
Then there were the 'specials' - including the fantasy models based on spaceships such as the Orion from 2001: A Space Odyssey.
The tanks were the only major failures - all those little wheels and the caterpillar tracks that got clogged up with glue - although I never much cared for the battleships either. Too many fiddly guns, which invariably got stuck to your fingers rather than to the decks.
Airfix did an odd line, too, in garden birds, which I always thought a bit suspect. I liked the dinosaurs, though - very easy to glue together.
Ah yes, the glue. Amateurs (like me) used the recommended polystyrene cement, in a tube. It smelt of a mixture of chloroform and ether and had similar effects - I remember 1972 to 1975 going by in a sweet- smelling, vaguely narcotic hydrocarbon haze.
The glue also dried to a thin and hard translucent varnish on one's fingers, which for some reason was extremely satisfying to peel off.
It was pretty hopeless for making model aeroplanes, though. First, it was far too thick and gloopy. Second, it had a tendency to liquefy the parts you were supposed to be joining together.
'The pleasure was in making it, not owning it'
//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
Airfix glue was just about fine for sticking, say, two halves of a big flat wing together, but worse than useless for assembling the undercarriage of a Boeing Superfortress bomber or (most notoriously of all) the mechanism for the 'Dambuster' Avro Lancaster's spinning bomb.
I remember it now. The Lancaster kit was a big one, in black - which meant it looked rather sinister. The bomb, a barrel-like cylinder, was supposed to be supported by a spindly scaffold in the bomb bay. If you did it properly, it would even twirl on its mountings. But the glue meant it just welded itself together in a plasticky mess.
Then there were the parts themselves. Boys' magazines and the knowledgeable chaps in the model shops suggested you could use a sharp knife to cut away the parts from their plastic 'sprue'.
Most of us, however, simply wrenched them off with brute force, leaving bits of unwanted moulding to spoil the lines of our models and ensure that none of the pieces slotted together neatly.
You could buy special solvent adhesives to glue the parts together more easily and with less mess, but this seemed to be missing the point. The point was to get the kit made and into play as soon as possible.
Yes, painting the cockpit before it was inserted into the fuselage made a lot of sense, but doing so just seemed too time-consuming for the ordinarily impatient chap.
That approach seemed the first step on a long road of obsession which led to some boys (or more probably their dads) flying their perfectly painted aircraft in formation, dangling from invisible fishing line from the ceiling.
Or perched on those plastic stands on a shelf, perfectly angled as if in flight, but gathering dust.
No time for this, I thought. After all, WWII was raging back in the bedroom - and the dogfights wouldn't wait.
The great thing was that even if a kit went wrong, it didn't really matter. I remember once misreading the instructions on my Messerschmitt Me-262 jet fighter - the one which would have won Hitler the war if he'd got his hands on it three years earlier.
It looked all wrong, but undeterred, I made the classic Airfix conversion, from a static non-flying display to a full flying model aircraft, courtesy of my first-floor bedroom window and some artful stuffing of its jet nozzles with meths-soaked tissue paper before setting it alight.
It looked very pretty on the way down, before smashing itself to bits in a pool of flaming spirits on the patio below.
It didn't really matter if you ended up destroying it, because the pleasure was in making the kit, not owning it afterwards.
But such irreverence was inappropriate for the 'Superkits' - the ones whose huge boxes taunted us from the model shop window, with price stickers way beyond what pocket money or paper round could possibly supply.
At a massive 1:24 scale - meaning a completed WWII aircraft took up most of a table top - these objects of my desire comprised the Spitfire, Mustang and the Messerschmitt Me-109. I can't remember how much they cost, but it was several pounds, even then.
I finally got my hands on the Spitfire kit when I was about 12, but sadly by then it was wasted on me. Model railways had taken over in my affections and the kit languished, half-made like an Ikea cabinet, with a vital gizmo missing.
Although Airfix is still going strong under the ownership of model train firm Hornby, its glory days will, in my mind, be those magic years of the early Seventies. Best summed up by perhaps the company's most unusual models - those of the Apollo moonships.
Building the Saturn V rocket was unlike anything else I had done. No fiddly undercarriage, no twirly bombs, no duck- egg blue paint required (thankfully). It was all surreal white, straight lines, external minimalism concealing terrifying internal complexity (the first-stage engines were, I remember, rather fiddly to put together).
When finished, even the adults were impressed by this tower of modernity rising nearly three feet from the living-room floor. It was like a slice of the 21st century had been teleported into the Seventies. A bit like the real Moon programme, in fact.
• The Boys' Book Of Airfix by Arthur Ward is published by Ebury at £20. To order a copy at £18 (p&p free), call 0845 155 0720.
More...Buy a copy of THE BOYS' BOOK OF AIRFIX
www.mailbookshop.co.uk/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/product_10351_24001_173024_100_24609_24609_category_
www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1208224/The-world-war-bedroom-As-new-book-celebrates-fiddly-joys-Airfix-Michael-Hanlon-lovingly-assembles-memories.html
By Michael Hanlon
Last updated at 1:07 PM on 25th August 2009
The paint, in the end, was what divided the men from the boys - the modellers from those who just wanted to play with their planes.
For me, this sort of artistry was a step in skill too far. I could stick a toy Spitfire together in an afternoon - the result would even vaguely resemble designer R.J. Mitchell's beautiful warbird in outline - but paint it properly? No way.
Not for want of trying. After all, I bought the little tins of Humbrol enamel - the names resonate to this day: 'duck egg blue', 'camouflage green (matt)' - the brushes and the thinners.
And now the trick bit: A young boy works on an Airfix model of a Hawker Hurricane
But the result was always the same - a discordant, multi-coloured mess. And that was before trying to apply the decals - flimsy transfers which usually ended up stuck to your skin rather than on the wings or fuselage.
Inevitably, there would be more enamel on the dining table, on my hands and in my hair than on the plastic plane. Clearing everything up took me - or more usually my mother - far more time than assembling the actual aircraft.
Not every little boy built - and tried to paint - Airfix kits in those days, but the experience was as necessary a part of growing up as learning to tie one's shoelaces or riding a bike without stabilisers.
Building an aircraft out of dozens of pieces of flimsy injection-moulded plastic requires patience, character and a modicum of skill. Which might have been good for us.
Look at the populations of today's prisons and madhouses and you will find young men for whom the experience of assembling the undercarriage of a Wellington Bomber is an unknown pleasure, men for whom 'duck egg blue' is a mere abstraction and people who have never lusted after a Messerschmitt in a massive 1:24 scale.
Now a new book, by an expert on every kit Airfix ever launched (its first, by the way, was not for a plane, but for a Ferguson tractor) tells the story of the 'toy' that turns British boys into decent British chaps.
'Airliners were seductive but unsatisfying'
//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
I can remember my first Airfix kit, given to me when I was about six or seven.
It was a 1:72 model of a Lockheed F-104 Starfighter, a glamorous, pointynosed supersonic American jet combat aircraft. The Starfighter, I found out later, was so dangerous (for your own side, not the enemy) in real life that it was called the Flying Coffin.
I remember opening the box and the racks of polystyrene parts came tumbling out. I was too young to follow the instructions on my own, but with a bit of adult help, I managed to produce something roughly resembling a miniature version of a real plane.
Airfix was the Ikea of toys - you had to put it together yourself and sometimes the kit came with bits missing. But unlike an Ikea bookcase, building an Airfix kit was always extremely enjoyable. And the instructions were always in English.
As a result, I was soon hurtling into the whole Airfix experience. I was never terribly good at making the models, but that was not the point - it was the doing and the trying that mattered.
Airfix kits were cheap - they still are. You could get a 1:72 WWII aircraft for about 50p in the 1970s, a week's pocket money; a big airliner would cost rather more. Then there were the Superkits, more of which later, after which we all lusted.
It became clear that there were good kits and bad kits. Airliners were seductive - they had swooping streamlined curves and few parts to befuddle - but they were, in the end, rather unsatisfying.
They were just too simple, and everything slotted together too neatly. The only fiddly bits were the cabin windows, which came as a strip of clear polystyrene to be inserted from the inside. Inevitably, they got smeared with glue.
Indeed, even if you constructed the airliners properly, they just ended up looking like the clunky promotional models you saw in travel agents' windows.
The best kits tended, of course, to be World War II aircraft: Spitfires, Hurricanes and their German (and Japanese) equivalents. For us small boys in the 1970s, WWII was still in full swing, and our model planes allowed us to indulge our Nazi-bashing fantasies to the full.
Turning boys into decent men: Airfix kits teach patience and skill
I often wondered what German boys would have thought of this - and whether they made Airfix squadrons of their own. It turns out that they did, but under post-war German law, any depiction of the swastika or other Nazi insignia was banned.
Indeed, kits exported to Germany had to have these markings missing - and they were carefully removed by a censor at the Airfix export depot.
Then there were the 'specials' - including the fantasy models based on spaceships such as the Orion from 2001: A Space Odyssey.
The tanks were the only major failures - all those little wheels and the caterpillar tracks that got clogged up with glue - although I never much cared for the battleships either. Too many fiddly guns, which invariably got stuck to your fingers rather than to the decks.
Airfix did an odd line, too, in garden birds, which I always thought a bit suspect. I liked the dinosaurs, though - very easy to glue together.
Ah yes, the glue. Amateurs (like me) used the recommended polystyrene cement, in a tube. It smelt of a mixture of chloroform and ether and had similar effects - I remember 1972 to 1975 going by in a sweet- smelling, vaguely narcotic hydrocarbon haze.
The glue also dried to a thin and hard translucent varnish on one's fingers, which for some reason was extremely satisfying to peel off.
It was pretty hopeless for making model aeroplanes, though. First, it was far too thick and gloopy. Second, it had a tendency to liquefy the parts you were supposed to be joining together.
'The pleasure was in making it, not owning it'
//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
Airfix glue was just about fine for sticking, say, two halves of a big flat wing together, but worse than useless for assembling the undercarriage of a Boeing Superfortress bomber or (most notoriously of all) the mechanism for the 'Dambuster' Avro Lancaster's spinning bomb.
I remember it now. The Lancaster kit was a big one, in black - which meant it looked rather sinister. The bomb, a barrel-like cylinder, was supposed to be supported by a spindly scaffold in the bomb bay. If you did it properly, it would even twirl on its mountings. But the glue meant it just welded itself together in a plasticky mess.
Then there were the parts themselves. Boys' magazines and the knowledgeable chaps in the model shops suggested you could use a sharp knife to cut away the parts from their plastic 'sprue'.
Most of us, however, simply wrenched them off with brute force, leaving bits of unwanted moulding to spoil the lines of our models and ensure that none of the pieces slotted together neatly.
You could buy special solvent adhesives to glue the parts together more easily and with less mess, but this seemed to be missing the point. The point was to get the kit made and into play as soon as possible.
Yes, painting the cockpit before it was inserted into the fuselage made a lot of sense, but doing so just seemed too time-consuming for the ordinarily impatient chap.
That approach seemed the first step on a long road of obsession which led to some boys (or more probably their dads) flying their perfectly painted aircraft in formation, dangling from invisible fishing line from the ceiling.
Or perched on those plastic stands on a shelf, perfectly angled as if in flight, but gathering dust.
No time for this, I thought. After all, WWII was raging back in the bedroom - and the dogfights wouldn't wait.
The great thing was that even if a kit went wrong, it didn't really matter. I remember once misreading the instructions on my Messerschmitt Me-262 jet fighter - the one which would have won Hitler the war if he'd got his hands on it three years earlier.
It looked all wrong, but undeterred, I made the classic Airfix conversion, from a static non-flying display to a full flying model aircraft, courtesy of my first-floor bedroom window and some artful stuffing of its jet nozzles with meths-soaked tissue paper before setting it alight.
It looked very pretty on the way down, before smashing itself to bits in a pool of flaming spirits on the patio below.
Now for the fun part: After painting their Spitfire and Hurricane planes the boys pretend they're at war
It didn't really matter if you ended up destroying it, because the pleasure was in making the kit, not owning it afterwards.
But such irreverence was inappropriate for the 'Superkits' - the ones whose huge boxes taunted us from the model shop window, with price stickers way beyond what pocket money or paper round could possibly supply.
At a massive 1:24 scale - meaning a completed WWII aircraft took up most of a table top - these objects of my desire comprised the Spitfire, Mustang and the Messerschmitt Me-109. I can't remember how much they cost, but it was several pounds, even then.
I finally got my hands on the Spitfire kit when I was about 12, but sadly by then it was wasted on me. Model railways had taken over in my affections and the kit languished, half-made like an Ikea cabinet, with a vital gizmo missing.
Although Airfix is still going strong under the ownership of model train firm Hornby, its glory days will, in my mind, be those magic years of the early Seventies. Best summed up by perhaps the company's most unusual models - those of the Apollo moonships.
Building the Saturn V rocket was unlike anything else I had done. No fiddly undercarriage, no twirly bombs, no duck- egg blue paint required (thankfully). It was all surreal white, straight lines, external minimalism concealing terrifying internal complexity (the first-stage engines were, I remember, rather fiddly to put together).
When finished, even the adults were impressed by this tower of modernity rising nearly three feet from the living-room floor. It was like a slice of the 21st century had been teleported into the Seventies. A bit like the real Moon programme, in fact.
• The Boys' Book Of Airfix by Arthur Ward is published by Ebury at £20. To order a copy at £18 (p&p free), call 0845 155 0720.
More...Buy a copy of THE BOYS' BOOK OF AIRFIX
www.mailbookshop.co.uk/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/product_10351_24001_173024_100_24609_24609_category_
www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1208224/The-world-war-bedroom-As-new-book-celebrates-fiddly-joys-Airfix-Michael-Hanlon-lovingly-assembles-memories.html
