By the time the early 1980’s came around I was around about the right age to start making model aeroplanes such as those made most famously by Airfix. Â I can’t claim to have been very good at it, but it was good fun and the finished models looked great on my shelf or hanging from the ceiling.
These kits came with all the various little pieces attached to plastic frames. Â The pieces were supposed to be removed using a craft knife and the little extra blobs of plastic sanded off. Â More often than not I just used the “wiggle it about until it falls off” technique and then lived with the plastic nobbles.
Following the numbered  instructions carefully you got the required pieces for the step you were on, then glued them all together with polystyrene cement.  I used to hate that stuff.  You’d gently squeeze the tube and nothing would come out, so you squeeze harder and harder until it suddenly shot out a great dollop of the stuff all over the piece, your fingers, the table and anything else within squirting distance.  This invariable meant that the fuselage of the plane ended up with gluey fingerprint marks all over it.
Once it was all glued together, with the little man safely cocooned under the transparent plastic cockpit lid, the next step was to paint it. Â You had little tubs of smelly paint made by Airfix or Humbrol that had to be shook up and stirred before use. Â They came in a variety of colours which were all given code numbers, and the instructions told you which numbers you needed from which paint manufacturer. Â Since the instructions were always just black and white you basically had a diagram with lots of numbered arrows telling you which colours to use where.
To be honest I hated the painting stage so I often skipped it, which meant I sometimes had some odd looking planes with blue wings and dark grey fuselage, but they still looked good. Â My painting skills are not great, so they probably looked better unpainted than painted!
The final step was the most fiddly of all, which was applying the water transfers. Â These came on a sheet of card which you had to cut up and then soak in water for a bit. Â Eventually the transfer came loose from the card and it could be slid carefully onto the model. Â You had to be careful too, as they were very easy to break or get folded up on top of themselves, which looked a right mess.
Still, I had a lot of fun making the kits, and once you’d mastered planes there were always kits of cars, helicopters, tanks, battleships and even soldiers. Â I even remember one year I got a really cool model of the human skeleton for Christmas, which sat on my shelf for many years.
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I could build the kits, I was just poor at the painting
Yeah, that was always my failing. I could never paint the fine details well enough and I hated all that messing about with white spirit cleaning out the brushes afterwards.
That’s probably why I still hate painting to this day and will avoid painting walls etc. if I can. Mind you, I’d rather paint than try to hand wallpaper…
I loved those things – I ended up having more luck painting the detail pieces before assembling them… that way they were pre-masked by the plastic frame so I didn’t have to be too precise!
I’m surprised you can’t paint, your drawing is fab.
If I put my mind to it I can draw OK (although some of the evidence on this very site may not seem to indicate that – check out some of my illustrations in the sweets section!) but I’ve always found painting too messy. I end up with it all over my fingers and get frustrated, and I can’t paint a straight line for toffee.
Marc makes a good point about painting the pieces before you put it together. I always knew that was what you were *supposed* to do, but I just wanted to get straight to putting the kit together, so I was my own worse enemy in that respect.
I was never a lover of the plane models due to the reasons expressed in your post (stickers and painting), but I do remember they did a range of dinosaurs which I had quite a few of.
These were great on all fronts.
1. Big pieces (legs, body, tail, etc.).
2. No transfers.
3. Dinosaurs where all one colour (green or brown) apart from a little white and red for the mouth and a colour for the eyes.
Oh yeah, I remember them on the shelves of Beatties (a good toy shop chain sadly no longer with us). They always looked interesting but I tended to stick with airplanes, or some model buildings for my train set.
[…] the beginning of this week I wrote about Airfix kits, which prompted a bit of a discussion on painting the finished model. Â It was mentioned that […]
Just came in to say hello. been narrow gaugin’ for 10 years
Nice to see the more traditional toys from time gone by. Airfix kits were a hobby of mine with hours of making painting and re-inacting war games which never actually happened only in my dreams, but at the time that was good enough for me.