Resources and Recommended Sites
Kit databases, review sites and colour references — the pages we open when the answer is not on our shelves.
Half the questions that come into the shop are not really about stock. They are about whether a kit has been reissued, which aftermarket set actually fits, what colour an airframe was in a particular year, or why a conversion will not sit down on the plastic. We answer what we can across the counter. For the rest, we point people at the sites below. Nothing on this page is paid for, nobody has asked to be listed, and we have no arrangement with any of them — they are simply the ones we open ourselves when a customer's question is better answered elsewhere.
Databases, reviews and reference
- Scalemates — The closest thing the hobby has to a union catalogue. Type in a kit number and it will tell you the history of the tooling, every boxing the kit has appeared in, the aftermarket sets that fit it and who has reviewed it. We check it before quoting on anything second-hand.
- Cybermodeler Online — Hobby news and long, photograph-heavy reviews, with a particular strength in colour and marking references. Useful when you need to see an undercarriage bay rather than read a description of one.
- HyperScale — One of the oldest aircraft and armour magazines on the web, and still being kept up. The gallery archive runs back decades, which makes it the place to look when you want to see how a particular kit behaves in someone else's hands.
- IPMS Stockholm — A club site with an unusually good helpdesk — Urban's colour reference charts for RAF, Luftwaffe and US aircraft paintwork are the ones we open when a customer asks which tin comes nearest to a 1943 scheme.
Between them these four cover most of what we cannot: what was made, what it looks like and what colour it should be.
Beyond the bench: miniature precision
Scale modelling is one branch of a larger habit — taking a real object and reproducing it closely enough to convince somebody who knows the original. The same instinct turns up in model railways, in miniature engines, in the workshops behind museums, and, at the far end of the money scale, in mechanical watches. A fair number of our customers, especially the ones building racing cars and figures, collect watches as well, and they end up having the argument we have about resin conversions and turned metal barrels: how close is close enough, and who decides?
The watch trade has been settling that question in public for far longer than we have, and at much greater expense. If you want to follow how it is going, the most methodical comparison work we have come across — case profiles, movements, bracelet end-links, the small details that give a copy away — is on the Rolex super clone watches that the whole business is organised around. Read it the way you would read a good build thread: useful, opinionated, and worth an hour before you spend anything.
How we choose what goes on this page
A site earns a place here if we have used it ourselves for at least a year and it is still being kept up. We take no payment, no trade and no reciprocal listing for it, and we do not run a banner exchange. If one of these links has died, or has turned into something we would no longer recommend, tell us — an email is easiest — and we will replace it or take it off the page.