u/MOS6510YT

So..

This is the New Tooled Red Pill Models 1/32 F-4 Phantom II

1:32 scale plastic model kit

• Brand new tooling from Red Pill Models
• Detailed cockpit and airframe components
• Finely engraved panel lines and rivet detail
• Large-scale representation of the iconic naval Phantom
• Multiple weapons and external stores options
• Designed for highly detailed display builds
• Metal Under Carriage with Rubber Tyres

It does have fantastic-looking decal sheets and masking set

It does have fantastic-looking decal sheets and masking set, plus the metal undercarriage is a nice addition! Especially if its a heavy bird/

But no photo etch or 3D printed parts.. its mostly plastic

Rumour is this kit will retail around £340 €360 $450* in model shops

*Delete as appropriate

But the Question is......

Is that just too much for a 1/32 scale model kit..? I think that is outrageous.

The first test shots of Arma Hobby’s completely new-tool 1/72 F4F-3 Wildcat are here.

“This is the moment when CAD design starts turning into a real model kit — and it also means we’re getting closer to shipping preorders.

In the article, we show the first sprues from the new molds and talk a bit about what happens next before the kit reaches your workbench.”

👉 Read more:
https://armahobbynews.pl/en/blog/2026/05/15/f4f-3-wildcat-test-shots-1-72/

Still good as when tooled in 1975! I went for a proper dusty look

Photoetch: A Choice, Not a Compromise!

The Scale Modeller’s Love-Hate Affair With Tiny Bits Of Metal

If you’ve ever spent a quiet Sunday afternoon working on your workbench, carefully assembling a 1/35th scale Tiger tank only to realise that the moulded plastic grilles look about as realistic as a wax work in Madame Tussauds, then you, my friend, have stared into the abyss. And the abyss stared back at you in the form of a wafer-thin sheet of brass cut into microscopic, fiddly bits we called photoetch. It’s the modelling equivalent of Laminate flooring in your house: utterly brilliant when it fits properly, so it looks good, and a complete and total disaster when it doesn’t.

I have been building scale models since before I had hair down there, back when Airfix kits came with instructions that basically said: “glue the wings on the fuselage and hope for the best.”

But photoetch? Oh, photoetch changed everything. It’s the detail freak’s crack cocaine. And like all hard drugs, it delivers euphoria followed by a crashing comedown that leaves you questioning your life choices! while fishing for a 0.3mm handrail under the sofa with your grandma’s old nylon stocking over the end of the pipe on a hoover.

So, what exactly is Photoetch? Well, photoetched parts are those delicate, laser-precise sheets of metal, usually brass, sometimes stainless steel, that manufacturers create by coating a thin sheet of metal with photoresist, which is a light-sensitive material, blasting it with UV light through a negative, and then dunking the whole lot in some form of acid to eat away everything except the bits you actually need. The result? Grilles so fine they look like they came off a real Panzer tank, seatbelts thinner than a human hair, and instrument panels with stunning raised bezels that make plastic ones look like they were carved by a drunk with a spoon. It’s pure witchcraft. Glorious, expensive witchcraft.

The history of photoetch in modelling is a tale of quiet revolution, much like the invention of the microwave oven – nobody asked for it, but once it arrived, you couldn’t imagine life without it. The process itself dates back to the early 20th century for jewellery and fancy bits on posh watches, but it only properly invaded our hobby in the late 1970s. I’ve been told that modellers were raiding watch cases for gears to add to the aircraft cockpit as trim wheels because, frankly, plastic looked pants. Then along came Waldron Products in the mid-to-late ’70s with the first proper aftermarket etched bits. By the mid-1980s, Model Technologies were churning out proper model-specific sets – stainless steel instrument panels with actual 3D depth. You could see the dials! It was like going from black-and-white telly to colour overnight.

The big manufacturers cottoned on quickly. Monogram’s HiTech series was one of the first to shove photoetch into the box – a dozen or so parts on a fret and suddenly your F-14 had sharp parts that didn’t look like they’d been moulded from a melted wax candle. Trimaster and others followed suit in 1987. Then, in 1989, in the dying days of communist Czechoslovakia, a chap called Dr Eduard started etching bits in his garage. By 1993, he was selling proper kits, but the photoetch? That became his empire. Eduard, Aber, and Gold Medal Models, who gave us this Bismarck etch set that set the standard forward in 1988, suddenly every serious modeller had a drawer full of these things that looked like they’d been designed by a sadistic watchmaker on a deadline.

And the good? Oh, it’s just magnificent. Photoetch is one of the reasons your model can properly look like the real thing rather than a Fisher-Price toy that’s been sat on by a toddler and covered in crayon. Take engine grilles. In plastic, they’re solid lumps with holes drilled by a drunk mole. But in photoetch, they’re a lattice of perfect scale mesh that lets you see the radiator behind. Or tank fenders, those delicate, perforated chunks that get knocked off real vehicles by every low-hanging branch in Normandy. Plastic versions are chunky and thick; etched ones are paper-thin and actually flex and bend like the real steel. Handrails on ships? In 1/350 scale, plastic ones look like railway sleepers. Photoetch gives you railings so fine you need a microscope and the steady hands of a brain surgeon.

Instrument panels are where photoetch really shines. Forget decals that sit on top like a bad tattoo. With photoetch, you get layered panels: the base, the instruments, the glass, the bezels, they are all stacked up so that when you shine a torch through the canopy, it looks like the real cockpit has the lights on. And don’t get me started on seatbelts. Those fiddly etched straps with tiny buckles? Glue them in the seat, weather them, and your cockpit suddenly looks like it’s about to fly a combat mission rather than a shopping trip to Asda.

The realism is addictive. Metal looks like metal. It takes paint differently – you can get that perfect worn, bent and distorted effect that plastic simply refuses to deliver. And the thinness of it! Take Ariels, for example, they look great, unlike those pathetic plastic aerials that you probably make by stretching an old piece of sprue over a candle. Etched brass ones laugh in the face of molten plastic. It’s the modelling upgrade that turns “quite nice” into “a museum piece that makes your mates weep with envy.” If you’re building for competition or just to flex in the local model club, photoetch is non-negotiable. It’s the difference between a Big Mac and a proper Burger lovingly cooked for you by Gordon Ramsey.

But – and there’s always a but – the bad is biblical. Photoetch is the hobby’s equivalent of trying to plug a USB plug into a socket, in the dark, whilst wearing oven gloves. Those parts are tiny. Tinier than the screws in your glasses. You snip one off the fret with your special fake godhand snips and ping – it’s gone. Vanished. Eaten by the carpet monster that lives under every modeller’s workbench. I’ve lost more 1/72 scale track links than I’ve had Greggs ‘ steak bakes.

The thing is, Bending them is an art form, a technique that only comes with doing it over and over again. And, you need special tools – folding jigs, tweezers that cost more than a wing nut wings kit, and the one thing I don’t have, the patience of a saint. Get it wrong, and you’ve got a mangled mess that looks like it’s been attacked by a tabloid newspaper. And glueing? Yes, Superglue is your only friend, but it also glues your fingers together, your glasses to your nose, and that crucial PE part to the side of your thumb forever. I once spent three hours trying to attach a tiny etched linkage ring to a Panzer’s hull, only for it to ping off into the void the moment I stood up to go for a piss.

Now, just painting these photoetch parts is another soulless task. Some will leave it bare for that lovely brass look, but most of us want it to match the rest of the model. Which means primer, then paint, then you realise you’ve flooded the etch lines. Weathering? Forget it. Those delicate bits snap off if you look at them funny. And the instructions? Eduard’s sometimes come across like IKEA diagrams designed by a Swede who just wanted to eat meatballs all day. Fold tab A into slot B while bending the part into a curve. It’s easier to waz after 8 pints of Guinness, in the dark, trying not to hit the seat.

The time sink is criminal, too. A basic kit might take you a weekend with a bottle of Tamiya Extra Thin and a sanding stick. Add a full photoetch set, and suddenly it’s six weeks of evenings sanding off plastic, your social life is dead, and your other half is threatening divorce because at the dining table is now just her and the kids, while you are in the other room performing photoetch surgery. And the cost! The kit is £40. The etch set is another £25. Plus, all the tools you need because your old ones are useless? Another £50. You’re basically paying to make yourself miserable.

Then there’s the overkill. Do you really need photoetched cockpit details if the canopy is closed? No. But you’ll still buy the set because you’re weak and the marketing blurb said “museum quality.”

In scales like 1/72, it can actually look wrong – too flat, too perfect. And beginners? Forget it. Photoetch will make you quit modelling faster than a badly moulded short-shot part.

So, is it worth it? To the most experienced of Modellers who want everything to be perfect. Of course it bloody is. That’s the paradox. Photoetch basically turns your model kit into something over-engineered, eye-wateringly expensive, and it’ll make you question your sanity every single time you use it. But when you step back, tilt the model under the light, and see those perfect grilles, those impossibly fine railings, that cockpit that looks like the real thing shrunk down by Rick Moranis… you forget the swearing, the lost parts, the blood (yes, I’ve cut myself on the edges), and the sheer rage.

But for many scale modellers (and I put myself in this faithful plastic-only group), we do not! And we probably tolerate it because we sometimes have to use it. You see a lot of these companies in the kit-manufacturing business, like Mini Art, Ryefield Models, and the sods at Thunder Models. seem to think that every scale model needs a photo-etch fret the size of a tea towel. In fact, it probably puts a lot of scale modellers off purchasing a kit when they know it comes with a ton of photoetch.

Photo-etch is magnificent when you actually need it. A delicate radiator grille on a 1:35 Tiger? Superb. Tiny seatbelts on a Spitfire cockpit? Chef’s kiss. But when the manufacturer slaps it in the box for something that could be perfectly fine in moulded plastic, like a simple dashboard or a mudguard that’s about as thick as a credit card anyway.

This type of photoetch use is utterly pointless, twice as fiddly, and guaranteed to end with you swearing at 1 am while trying to fold a microscopic bracket with tweezers that has more personality than most politicians. And you probably won’t see it when glued in place, or you wouldn’t know it was there. It becomes the modelling equivalent of fitting your bed with a headboard made from hand-beaten gold, then painting it Black.

Photo-etch should be a glorious optional extra, like cream on top of a hot chocolate if you’ve been good with the diet all week, or Amazon Prime TV. Not a compulsory tax on your patience.

Photoetch has this love/hate relationship in this wonderful hobby we call Scale Modelling. But it must always be a choice, not a compromise. And when scale model companies completely embrace this mantra, they will probably sell more kits.

Let me know your thoughts in the replies :)

Mos6510 Models

May 13, 2026

The Dassault/Dornier Alpha Jet is one of those clever little Franco-German love children that came about because, back in the swinging sixties, everyone started to realise their old jet trainers were about as cutting-edge as a Skoda Estelle with the engine in the back. You know the sort of thing, like the Lockheed T-33, that ancient American sluggish jet that rattled like a bag of Snap On spanners, or the Classic Fouga Magister two seater developed in the 1950’s, which looked delightful but so underpowered it was basically a hairdryer with wings.

So Britain and France joined forces to build something supersonic and terrifying, but halfway through they developed it into the SEPECAT Jaguar, a proper, complete nuclear-capable strike beast that’s brilliant at blowing things up but absolute shite at teaching wet-behind-the-ears teenagers how to fly without sending Deepest Sympathy Cards to their Parents.

That left a whopping hole to fill. So, le French knocked on the door of ze Germans and said, “Why don’t we build a trainer together? It’ll need to be subsonic, sensible, not too expensive, and we can be friends with benefits.” Ze Germans, who’d been buying American planes for years and secretly fancied a bit of European cooperation (plus they needed something to replace their trainer jets.. the rather outdated Fiat G.91s, which were basically Italian lawnmowers with weapons), said “Ja, bitte!”

They even pushed that it must have twin engines because they’d lost so many pilots in the single-engine F-104 Starfighter (The Witwenmacher) that they were running out of brave young men.

There was a competition, and the winner was a mash-up from Dassault, Breguet (which Dassault later swallowed whole in 1971), and Dornier.

It started life as the TA501, but they named it the Alpha Jet because it sounded faster than it actually was. The French wanted a trainer, basically to turn cadets into proper pilots, while ze Germans wanted a light attack jet to lob bombs at Russians if the Cold War got a bit warm.

So they built two versions: the French one with a round nose for that elegant catwalk look, and the German one with a pointy nose that made it look a bit nasty and aggressive. Both are powered by a pair of SNECMA Turbomeca Larzac engines – French, obviously, because the Germans tried to sneak in an American General Electric job, and the French threw a massive Gallic strop until everyone agreed to use the home-grown one after the French said they would fund the engine’s development themselves...

It wasn’t the most powerful thing in the world by a long shot, but it’s reliable, and you could repair it in ten minutes with a drunk mechanic using chewing gum and a lollipop stick, which is extremely handy when you’re in a hurry. Production was split among the Europeans. Dassault did the front and middle bits in France, Dornier the wings and tail in Germany, and the Belgians chipped in with the nose and flaps because... well, why the hell not?

They built hundreds of them. The French and Germans bought loads, and then everyone else from Egypt to Cameroon snapped them up. The Germans retired theirs after the Wall came down and sold them off cheaply, probably to fund more beer. The French, being French, gave some to the Patrouille de France, their aerobatic team, who paint them in red, white, and blue and fly them in ridiculously tight formations while trailing smoke and making the crowd go “ooh la la.”

They even tried upgrading it over the years with better engines, fancy avionics borrowed from the Mirage 2000, Clever laser rangefinders, and these so-called Magic missiles. Thus turning it into the Alpha Jet 2 or MS2 for run-of-the-mill customers who wanted to pretend they had a proper fighter. There was some backroom chat of a naval version for the carriers, but that never happened because, let’s face it, landing a jet on a ship is hard enough without the French being involved.

And to make it mustard, for the attack role, just hang a gun pod on the belly, the 30mm DEFA for le French, 27mm Mauser for ze Germans – and four more hardpoints under the wings for bombs, rockets, or whatever you fancy dropping on the bad guys. It’s not the fastest, it’s not the biggest, and it won’t win any dogfights against a proper fighter. But it’s cheap, cheerful, easy to fly, and does exactly what it says on the tin. It can be used to train pilots brilliantly and, if needs be, ruins someone’s day on the ground. In a world full of overcomplicated, overpriced American badasses, the Alpha Jet is a reminder that sometimes the Europeans can get it properly right. And that’s saying something.

Which brings me to a scale model kit that is ripe for a release into an Airfix Vintage Classic Box.

I give you the Airfix 1/72 Alpha Jet. First released in 1980, kit number 03035, and still, forty-odd years later, the plastic equivalent of a slightly knackered but thoroughly loveable British sports car that leaks oil but makes you grin like an idiot every time you fire it up.

Picture the scene. It’s 1980. Margaret Thatcher is finishing off decorating her new living room in Downing Street, the Falklands haven’t kicked off yet, and Airfix, the company that gave the world more polystyrene Spitfires than you could shake a Messerschmitt at, decide the world needs a 1/72 scale model of the Franco-German Alpha Jet. Not some prototype sketch. No, the proper production, “we’ve actually got this thing flying” version. Because, unlike their rivals at Matchbox, who released theirs a couple of years earlier and basically modelled a concept drawing that looked like it had been drawn by a committee in a hurry, Airfix went proper grown-up.

They gave you two different noses!! One pointy for the German attack boys, one rounded for the French trainers, so you could actually build the thing the way the Luftwaffe or the Armée de l’Air flew it. Genius. Or at least as close to genius as you get when you’re moulding soft grey plastic that bends if you breathe on it too hard.

A quick glance at Scalemates shows it’s had a bit of history. Released by Airfix in 1980, 81, and 1982, it then had a long break until Heller/Humbrol got their hands on the tooling after buying Airfix. Heller released it 3 times in the 1990’s, and then in 2003 in a Boxed set that included the Ouragan, Magister, and F-84 Thunderjet; all four had French Air Force schemes. Then we had the Great Heller/Humbrol Divorce in 2006 when Daddy and Mummy stopped loving each other, Mummy got Custody of the child and married Hornby. So in 2008, Airfix released the kit again before Heller released it in 2015, which was the last time we saw the Alpha Jet on the shelves…

Now, the version I have is the original release of the Alpha Jet. It even says NEW on the box! I crack open that classic Airfix box from 1980, and you’re greeted by the sort of joy only modellers understand. About 66 parts, I counted them, during a particularly slow Sunday morning, raised panel lines are so proud they could have their own postcode, a cockpit that’s basically two seats, two crew figures with no legs below the knees, modern-day Sir Douglas Bader style, and a one-piece canopy the size of a windscreen on a Reliant Robin. The plastic is that lovely, soft sea-grey stuff Airfix used back then, the kind that melts if your glue is even slightly too enthusiastic. You also get two drop tanks and four cluster bombs that look like they could level a small village!

I do remember building one in the 1990’s, it was the Heller release. As I recall, building it was pure 1980s theatre. The fuselage halves go together like they actually want to be friends, which is more than you can say for a lot of modern kits. The intakes fit after a bit of minor sanding; the wings have the correct anhedral if you bother to check the head-on diagram (most people don’t, and end up with something that looks like it’s been hit by a gust of wind). The undercarriage is fiddly but actually fits properly.

Looking inside this box at the decals… The decals? Oh, the decals. Original 1980 sheets for a Belgian Air Force trainer and a German Luftwaffe Alpha Jet A. They’re thin, they’re crispy, and they will fight you like a cornered badger unless you drown them in Micro Sol and pray. But like all decals of that decade, when they finally settle down over those raised panel lines, and you’ve painted the thing in the proper Luftwaffe grey-green camo or the Belgian training colours, it looks… well, it looks proper. Not Tamiya perfect, obviously. This isn’t some Japanese masterpiece with a photo-etched cockpit so detailed you need a microscope to see it. But it looks like an Alpha Jet. It has presence. It has soul.

And that’s the thing about this kit. In an age when every new release has resin engines added to the plastic, etched brass seatbelts that used to be moulded in the seat, and instructions that read like a PhD thesis, the 1980 Airfix Alpha Jet is a glorious reminder of why we started doing this hobby in the first place. It’s simple. It’s honest. It doesn’t pretend to be anything it isn’t. You can build it in a couple of evenings, stick it on the stand, and tell your mates it’s a QinetiQ bird banshee or a Patrouille de France special if you’re feeling fancy with aftermarket decals because you’ve ruined the ones that came in the box… It won’t win any accuracy competitions against modern tooling, but it will make you smile every time you walk past it.

So, verdict time. Is the Airfix 1/72 Alpha Jet the greatest model kit ever committed to polystyrene? No. That honour still belongs to something with fewer raised panel lines and better decals. But is it one of the most enjoyable? Absolutely. Should it be put into the Vintage Classic Hall of Fame? Well, it's a bit floppy, a bit basic, and of its time, but endlessly charming and far more fun than anything sensible. So yes, it should be put into that Airfix Vintage Classic box and sold for £9.99 with a fresh set of decals…

But if you see one by chance on eBay for sensible money, buy it. Build it. Make the glue fumes your cologne. Because in this over-engineered, joyless world, sometimes you just need a little piece of 1980 plastic that reminds you why modelling should be about the grin, not the grams of resin.

Airfix, you beautiful, slightly mad sorceress of sprues. Still brilliant after all these years.

I’ve spent a good portion of my life surrounded by things that piss me off, yet nothing, absolutely nothing, has caused me more swearing, more flung components across the room, and more outright despair than a Plastic Scale model kit.

Yes, that does include Airfix. That flimsy cardboard box full of grey plastic sprues, a set of instructions of just pictures taking you step by step, and a tiny tube of cement that could frustrate you by allowing a fingerprint to be embossed onto a delicate plastic part.

In Britain, saying “Airfix kit” is like saying “Hoover” for vacuum cleaner or “Biro” for pen. It’s the generic term for any collection of bits you’re supposed to turn into something recognisable. The BBC once described the Saturn V rocket as “a gigantic Airfix kit”. They said the same about the Airbus A380 assembly line. Even some banks used the Airfix name in an advert because, clearly, the great British public knows exactly what they’re on about.

And we do. Because every single one of us, unless we were raised on Minecraft and Sunny Delight, has sat at the dining room table at some point, surrounded by bits of Spitfire, cursing a part labelled “17 from frame B” that looks identical to parts 17 from frame A , and the fuselage doesn't always go together.

Plastic model kits, in the form we recognise today, only really kicked off after the war, but humans have been making tiny versions of things since we worked out how to hold a sharp rock. The Romans loved little bronze chariots and gladiators, basically Scalextric and Subbuteo two millennia early. Then, for centuries, you either bought a finished model (if you were posh) or you carved one yourself out of a bit of firewood while the missus nagged you to fix the roof.

Some madmen even put entire three-masted frigates inside bottles, which must have required the patience of a saint and the alcohol tolerance of Paul Gasgoine .

Then, in the 1930s, the world changed. A British company called Skybirds began selling 1:72-scale aircraft with fuselages and wings pre-cut from balsa wood. They threw in white-metal wheels, propellers, and undercarriage legs that looked like they’d been cast in someone’s garden shed after six pints. You still had to sand everything to within an inch of its life and constantly refer to scale drawings, but it was progress of sorts.

These “solid” kits hung around until the 1950s, mainly because people are stubborn.

The real revolution came from a company called Frog (which stood for “Flies Right Off the Ground”, their slogan for flying models)

In the late 1930s, Frog released the Penguin range, the fact that these ones didn’t fly: the first injection-moulded plastic kits most people had ever seen. The plastic was cellulose acetate, which is basically the Justin Bieber of early plastics: looks all right at first, but give it five minutes and it warps into something resembling a melted welly.

Still, you didn’t have to carve the fuselage yourself. It came in two hollow halves, often already glued together in the box, so it didn’t turn into a banana on the way home from the shop. All you had to do was paint it, stick some transfers on, and try to ignore the fact that the wings looked like they’d been designed by someone who’d only ever seen an aircraft from 30,000 feet through the bottom of a pint glass.

Injection moulding itself sounds very simple: You squirt hot plastic into a steel mould, let it cool, pop it out, job done. In practice, it was a nightmare. Early cellulose acetate cooled too fast and warped like a Labour manifesto promise. Moulds cost an absolute fortune because some poor craftsman had to carve an oversized wooden pattern, cover it in resin, pour wax into it to represent plastic thickness, make another resin copy, then use a pantograph to cut the final steel mould while praying to whichever god looks after obsessive-compulsives. The runners (the little channels the plastic flows through) were cut by hand. By hand! And the operators were paid by the piece, so half the parts came out looking like they’d been sat on by Ant and Dec.

A tiny Percival Gull cost three shillings; a Short Singapore flying boat set you back fifteen bob, which in 1937 money is roughly the GDP of a small African nation.

Frog advertised like mad (full front page of the Daily Mail, no less), but cellulose acetate was fighting a losing battle.

What the world really needed was a type of plastic that didn’t behave like an overcooked noodle. Enter polystyrene. Discovered in the 1830s, ignored by everyone except bored German chemists until the 1930s, polystyrene was very stable, shiny, and could be moulded at higher temperatures and pressures. The only problem was that the machinery needed to inject it cost more than a semi-detached house in Devon.

Fortunately, two things happened in the 1930s: Britain began wiring houses for electricity, and Hitler began wiring Germany for war. Suddenly, there was a desperate need for lightweight, complex, non-conductive plastic components in large quantities, quickly. Bakelite switches, radar housings, instrument panels, you name it. By 1945, British factories had injection-moulding machines that could knock out a Spitfire cockpit knob before you’d finished saying “Luftwaffe”. The war ended, the boys came home, the wives wanted vacuum cleaners, and the factories needed something to do. Polystyrene became the wonder material. You could make anything: combs, toys, Tupperware, and (more crucially for us hobbyists) model kits that didn’t slowly twist themselves into modern art.

Which brings us, finally, to Airfix.

Airfix didn’t start with aeroplanes. They started with combs. Cheap, injection-moulded combs sold in Woolworths for sixpence. The founder, a Hungarian chap called Nicholas Kove, realised the same machines that made combs could make tiny Spitfires if you swapped the moulds. And because the war had just finished, the only decent drawings of modern aircraft were the official Air Ministry recognition silhouettes. So Airfix created a plastic Spitfire kit. It was crude, with rivets the size of golf balls, and the propeller was fixed, but it sold by the bucketload.

From there, it exploded. Airfix moved to proper grey, white, and green polystyrene, 1:72 scale became the standard (because it fitted nicely in a shirt pocket and the boxes stacked neatly), and suddenly every birthday and Christmas, a small boy received a Series 1 bag with a Spitfire, Hurricane or Messerschmitt on the header card for one-and-six. By the 1960s and 70s, Airfix wasn’t just dominant; it was the only name in town. You didn’t build a model kit. You built an Airfix. Even if it was made by Revell, Tamiya or Matchbox, your mum still called it “your Airfix”.

The joy was completely universal. You ripped open the box, inhaled that unique new-plastic-and-glue smell that should be bottled as aftershave, tipped the fifty grey bits onto the table, and discovered the instructions assumed you held a PhD in engineering. You lost half the parts in the carpet within minutes. You painted your fingers and the cat.

You grabbed a hairy stick and painted the pilot’s face with Humbrol gloss bright red so he looked like he’d flown through a Heinz ketchup factory at Mach 2. And 6 weeks later, after much swearing and several temper tantrums in the household, you had something that vaguely resembled a Hawker Hurricane suspended from your bedroom ceiling on some cotton thread you borrowed from your nan's sewing box, slowly covering itself in dust and nostalgia.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is why the phrase “Airfix kit” entered the language. Not because of marketing. Not because of clever branding. But for 8 decades now, generations of British males (and a fair few females who weren’t supposed to but did anyway) have spent their childhoods locked in mortal combat with little plastic aeroplanes, ships, tanks, and the occasional Bentley Blower. We lost. They won. And we loved every swearing, cement-encrusted, finger-print-covered minute of it.

And if you don’t believe me, go on eBay right now and watch grown men with mortgages and prostate issues bid £200 for a 1973 bag of a Series 1 Airfix kit “still sealed, slight crush to header card”.

Some say that inside every middle-aged British bloke there’s still a ten-year-old boy looking for part 17 on frame b. All I know is, I’ve got a 1:24 Messerschmitt to finish, the decals on the cockpit are drying, and if anyone touches it, I’ll break their legs.

Plastic, Decals and Instructions. That’s Airfix. God bless it.