Piracy kills this hobby.

One of the best Dutch space model designers, Erik te Groen has permanently shut down his website. Reason: his freely available stuff was sold on the Chinese pirate website Alice papermodels. They take downloads of free models and sell these kits in their pirate webshop as printed packs for big prices. Not only Eriks stuff is found there, hundreds of model kits, created by numerous other designers, all their designed cars, planes, spacecraft, ships, planes, all models you can get (often for free) at the websites of the makers themselves, are being exploited by these Chinese criminals.
They themselves think it's all right, they don't see any copyright infringement because they are selling the models in print. But still they violate the creator's copyrights, because the designer didn't give them permission to sell the printed version.

Not only is this affecting the designers, it is affecting the whole community because those bastards simply cause some designers to stop designing and leave the hobby behind. Some have invented elaborate schemes to let people obtain their free models from their websites with passwords, quests and other methods, others simply delete their work and leave us behind with nothing. All because of these bastard Chinese pirates. 

What makes this hobby so great? Not just the paper modeling itself, It also is the free sharing of models. Great, superdetailed models of whatever you can think of. Models you'll never find in plastic. Models that are able to be build in big or smaller scales, depending on how you print them. Free models. Made by people who like to share them with the community. Something this pirate website is actively destroying by offering payed downloads of these free models they also got for free.

So be smart and save this hobby by looking for the proper places to download paper models and ignore Alice papermodel. Just don't go there and let them take advantage of other people's work.
Besides, how much of an idiot must one be to BUY a free model?

Space Shuttle Endeavour with ET and SRB's in 1/96 [Part 2]

And although I started off great and enjoyed myself a lot, I discovered the designer of the model made an error in the photographic skin. Endeavour should have had a small NASA meatball next to the "United States" sign on both of its sides. And since I also wasn't completely happy about the wings which showed just too much gap, it was first a visit to the Shop of Photos and then back to the cutting mat. Now I had two half-built shuttles laying on my desk. But the new wings were better. And today this is where I am: I glued the wing section to the payload bay and the cabin section!

Want to read and see more? Yes, you do. I know you do.

Westland Whirlwind (fighter plane) part 3

Yes, we're back at the Whirly for one last time. I have done one more model of the Westland Whirlwind and this time a little different. You could call it a study in aesthetics if you will. I printed another model but now on grey paper and I built it inside out, leaving off the propeller blades, the landing gear and by doing so reducing it just to its basic shape. More pics after the jump.

PS. There is news from the Space Shuttle frontier, more on that next week.