Tea with friends

Donna and I spent part of the afternoon with our friends Roger and Ruth. Tea on the patio in their delightful garden was fun and it was good to catch up as we haven't seen them for some time.

Roger with his Jetex model

Roger got back into aeromodelling more than ten years ago, partly because I encouraged him to do it. He's developed a particular interest in small models powered by rocket motors, either the original Jetex motors from the UK or today's Rapier motors. Either way, the models are of a wide variety of jet aircraft.

Not only has he built and flown many models (some of them designed himself) but he's been making reproductions of kits from the 1950s and 60s. This is painstaking work.

Roger begins with photocopies of original plans and photos of the models, or sometimes with an unbuilt kit. He enhances and remakes the original artwork, prints it on special tissue which can be applied to balsa sheets, cuts out the parts, and uses them to build replicas of the original kit versions.

As if all this isn't enough, Roger also writes numerous articles about his modelling and is planning to redevelop a website about it all.

The photo shows Roger with one of his latest models, his version of an original Swedish kit.

(If you liked this you might also like Journeys of heart and mind and Quote me on this.)