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    Airfix Kits
    Airfix Kits
    Airfix Kits
    Ebook98 pages43 minutes

    Airfix Kits

    By Trevor Pask

    4/5

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    About this ebook

    With the aid of stringy glue and scalpel-sliced fingers, young and old have turned display cabinets and bedrooms into mini-museums, or tiny battlefields. This book looks at the fascinating tale of this British company a pioneer in the world of modelling as well as its products, its changing fortunes over the years, and its links with popular culture. Using colour images, Trevor Pask explores this thriving pastime, allowing Airfix kit lovers to indulge in a nostalgic journey and those new to the hobby an intriguing insight into its history.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBloomsbury Publishing
    Release dateAug 20, 2011
    ISBN9780747811589
    Airfix Kits

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    • 4/5
      A little digested in its coverage of the 1970s but overall an excellent pocket history of this famous company.

    Book preview

    Airfix Kits - Trevor Pask

    HOW THE ‘AIRFIX KIT’ CAME ABOUT

    The box art and contents of the Frog Supermarine Spitfire kit from 1938. It was the first plastic kit ever produced of the Spitfire.

    THERE HAVE BEEN MANY companies associated with plastic model kits, but perhaps the best known is Airfix. The term ‘Airfix kit’ has, in Britain at least, become the generic term for any plastic model, or anything assembled from separate components. While I was writing this book, the term ‘like a gigantic Airfix kit’ was used in two BBC news reports. One described the construction of the Apollo 11 rocket, and the other described the final assembly line of the A380 double-decker airliner. More subtle, but in the same vein, was the use of the Airfix brand by a bank in a major advertising campaign.

    Clearly the media think that the British public know what an ‘Airfix kit’ is. Why this may be the case is easy to answer. There can be few people – and hardly any boys – born in the UK after the 1950s who have not experienced the joys or frustrations of building a plastic construction kit – a kit which during the 1960s and 1970s would almost certainly have been manufactured by Airfix.

    Plastic model kits as we know them have existed since the late 1940s, and earlier variants since the 1930s. Models, however, have existed for much longer. The Romans were especially fond of miniature racing chariots and figures of gladiators – reflecting interests that were literally the equivalent of current day Formula One motor racing or Champions League soccer. However, until the nineteenth century when the first constructional toys such as building blocks appeared, models were sold as completed items or had to be made at home. Such home-made models varied from simple figures carved from scraps of wood to elaborate ships in bottles and miniature engineering replicas. Whatever the skill or time available to the model maker, the impulse to create a miniature seems to have been a constant human need. This need has sought a form in the available materials of the time: wood, stone, paper, clay, metal, and – a few decades into the twentieth century – plastic.

    The box art and contents of the Frog Supermarine Spitfire kit from 1938. It was the first plastic kit ever produced of the Spitfire.

    The box art and contents of the Frog Hawker Fury. The early Frog Penguins came complete with paints and cement.

    The Frog Penguin catalogue from 1938: the world’s first range of plastic construction kits.

    The first model kits that the modern eye would recognise were produced in the early 1930s by the British company Skybirds. These were 1:72 scale aircraft kits that helped the modeller along by providing the major components – the fuselages and wings – in balsa wood, which had been pre-cut and shaped. Hard-to-make items such as wheels, undercarriage legs, propellers and canopies were supplied as metal castings, or mouldings in one of the early synthetic materials such as acetate or Bakelite. These ‘solid’ kits were popular, and they survived until the 1950s, but they still required a high degree of skill and practice to achieve an acceptable result. The wooden components still had to be trimmed and sanded to achieve an accurate outline, and constant reference was needed to a set of scale drawings.

    A more radical innovation was the Frog Penguin aircraft range from the late 1930s. Manufactured by International Model Aircraft, which was part of the Lines Brothers toy empire, Frog Penguin kits inherited their odd name from the company brand name, which came from ‘Flies Right Off the Ground’ (the slogan applied to all the company’s flying models) and the flightless nature of the penguin. The

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