Some time ago my friend (and former colleague) Mat Bailey contacted me to ask if I’d like some Matchbox kits that had belonged to his grandfather. After some delay (thanks Pally!) I brought them home recently.

If you built any models in the 70s you’ll recognise the style of box instantly. People rightly revere Roy Cross’s Airfix box tops but Matchbox’s should not be forgotten. I loved them as a kid.

Here’s the Fury and Mustang tops.

I built the Mustang when I was a boy, and although I can’t remember building it, the Fury artwork is very familiar, so I assume I did at some point.

If you’re familiar with Matchbox kits you’ll remember they were moulded in two or three colours of plastic, which for a seven year old was very exciting. And look, no paint needed!

I’m not sure of the date of issue of these particular copies, but the moulds are copyrighted in 1973 and 1974. I wonder if these were ‘pocket money’ prices then? And who was Keith O’Loughlin? Given the source of most of my kits back then I’ll bet he was a newsagent, and you could pick up a five pence mix to eat while you built the model.

Years ahead of their time, the overall painting instructions were in full colour, with detail pictures, again in colour, around the outside of the box.

These days I’m more than slightly sceptical about the claim of not needing paint, but I was far more accepting when I was seven.

The plastic itself is lovely. Although the panel lines are the older raised style, the parts themselves are crisply moulded, and nicely detailed, even by modern standards. Indeed, Revell are still issuing kits from these moulds, albeit in one colour, so you WILL need to paint them! (There’s even an attempt at a colour instruction booklet, along with some modelling hints and tips to get you going. (I invariably ignored the advice to not apply too much glue.))

Larger kits had even had a window in the back of the box so that you check out the ‘skill’ multi-coloured plastic, as we’d have labelled it then. (And the ‘ace’ positionable stand. So much more fun than Airfix’s rigid counterpart.)

‘Airfix’ has passsed in to general use like ‘Hoover’ has, as noun rather than a brand, but Matchbox kits were equally as good, if not better at times, and certainly very enticing for youngsters when browsing for a weekend project. I’m sure there are many modellers out there who cut their teeth on as many Matchbox kits as Airfix (or Frog).

Poring over these kits has been a really memory provoking event, not just of the kits themselves, but of all those Saturday afternoons at my nan and grandad’s, with Dickie Davis presenting World of Sport before a buffet tea with The Generation Game. Many thanks to Mat for that, it’s as much fun as the kits themselves.

It will be a shame to ‘spoil’ the pristine kits by building them, but I’m a builder rather than a collector, and I’m sure Mat would like to see them built. I have a couple of ideas of how to finish them, and present them with the boxes and instructions, and I’ll be moving on to these as soon as the Vulcan is finished.

Every modeller has one – a shelf of shame. The place partly completed models go to wait in limbo until completion. They go there for various reasons. Interest drops away, a bollock is dropped, or the next ‘must have’ kit comes along. I’ve had some sit there for years (there are some there that have been there for six or seven now) before a flash of inspiration hits and they come out again. They go on to be some of my favourite models.

In September I received the MFH 1/12 Mazda 787B from Sarah for my 50th birthday. I was gushing about how brilliant it is, and how people on the web had remarked they are addictive. Sarah asked if I wanted to do another one, and I said “Of course, but you know how expensive they are…”

“You could get another if you don’t buy any other kits for 12 months.” she said. I thought it was a joke, but it turns out she was serious. So here we are, nearly four months in, with no new kit purchases, and a shrinking shelf of shame. The Vulcan in the WIP page is one, and today I started back on the Skyline Models 1/144 Western Pacific Simpsons 737. As a massive Simpsons fan this was impossible to resist at Scale Model World a few years ago.

Yellow is a tricky colour to spray, and I made an absolute balls of it, so the model went on the shelf. Having taken it back up I’ve rubbed the yellow back, polished it, and reinstated some panel lines. As you’d expect the jet to be pristine there’s no point in doing any pre-shading, and at 1/144 it’s not really needed anyway. However, I did want the panel lines to be apparent, to stop the model looking like a toy. They are so fine there’s a risk of them disappearing under the required thickness of paint to make a good yellow, and washes not working. Yesterday I had the idea of using a Flory Models wash to highlight the lines before the final coats of yellow. The last coats of yellow will knock them back and prevent them being too stark. It does seem to have been effective, and here is the model drying in the spray booth before I get on with polishing and perhaps another very fine coat.

And the point of this post? Stop buying kits, and go back to those abandoned. When this is sitting on the shelf, or a display table at a show, I’ll be thinking back to it sitting on top of the spray booth, gathering dust for over a year, and glad I finished it.

Happy new year to everyone, from down in the shed. If you’ve been taking time out to build over the Christmas period I hope it’s been productive. Today there’s an update to the WIP page of the Vulcan.

It’s become a personal Christmas Eve tradition to have an episode or two of James May’s Toy Stories on with lunch. So I’m down the shed with the Airfix episode while Douglas has a time out. (Ie, a kip on the sofa.)

Merry Christmas to everyone!

If you’re a Facebook friend you’ll know that for most of last year our longdog Ted spent hours down in the shed with me, until he died in early December. Yesterday Sarah and I adopted his successor, a beautiful Saluki cross called Douglas. It will be a while before he’s spending shed time with me as we are slowly getting him used to being indoors. He’s probably never lived in a house, despite being around three years old, and pretty much everything is a new sound or smell for him to process. His first 24 hours with us have been very encouraging, but it’s going to be a long process. Hopefully he’ll be down here hogging the spray booth like Ted did very soon. Here he is helping with a bit of Lego, and generally making himself at home.

Latibulisation level set to a million.

Head over to mfhmazda787.com for an update to the build of Model Factory Hiro’s 1/12 Mazda 787B.

After Friday’s fun I decided this was necessary.

Before last night the most serious incidents in the shed have been limited to the odd scalpel cut, some decal solution in the eye, and the time I super-glued my elbow to the cutting mat, and stood up without realising. (That was just a wound to my pride to be frank!) Last night’s incident is an order of magnitude more serious.

I’m sure everybody has heard of the potential dangers of LiPo batteries, and their combustibility. And I’m sure most people, like me, have thought them over exaggerated scare-mongering. Last night I found out just how true the stories are and how dangerous one of these things can be. I was just starting to think of installing the electrics in a radio controlled glider I’m building, and got to trying out the batteries and charger I’d bought back in the summer. The battery had been on charge for about an hour when I decided to call it a night and go to bed. I turned to check the display on the charger and saw the battery looking like this:

It really should be a neatly packaged ‘obloid’ and not swollen and ‘bursty’. It was also hissing quietly and giving off puffs of vapour. I thought I’d take a quick video to send of to the vendor to get a replacement when the hissing got much worse.

It was obvious it needed getting out of the shed quickly so I stopped filming and put my phone down on the bench, when the battery gave out a huge jet of vapour from the bottom left in the video, which immediately turned to a jet of flame, burning my left arm as I tried to open the door. Luckily I’d picked it up by the cables, or I’d still be in hospital! The flames spread to the rest of the battery with a loud ‘whoomph’ before I managed to get the door open and throw it out.

Here it is burning a hole in my lawn.

And what was left this morning

In the seconds before I got it out of the shed it spewed red hot ‘soot’ – hot enough to burn in to the back of my phone case and ruin it. I dread to think what would have happened had I not noticed it was swollen when I did, as I was seconds from shutting up to go to bed, while the battery was seconds away from exploding. I’d have lost the shed and everything in it, no doubt about it. And that would be as nothing to it happening in the house. This is the closest I’ve come to a fire like this, and it’s very disconcerting to imagine the consequences of a change in timing.

If you have a charger and battery like this then do what I’ve just done and bin it, even if you’ve used it umpteen times and it’s been OK. Don’t risk it. I consider myself very lucky that this has been limited to a burn on the arm and no damage to my shed.

Anyway, I’ll be buying my replacement batteries and charger from a reputable UK vendor, not cheap off eBay. I’ve also just ordered two fire extinguishers, one for the shed and one for the house. This incident has made me think seriously, for the first time, about how I’d deal with a small fire in the house. Obviously ‘get out’ is the solution, but an extinguisher in the house might buy enough time to stop further damage.

A productive afternoon down in the shed correcting the Vulcan’s main gear legs. Check the Work In Progress section for some pictures.