Wingnut Wings Roland D.VIb (1/32)
The city of Wellington, New Zealand, lays just across the Tasman Sea from my place in Canberra, Australia. And out near Wellington's airport sits the Stone Street Studios established by Sir Peter Jackson, the acclaimed director of The Lord of the Rings trilogy. His production company is called Wingnut Films, so perhaps you can see where I'm going with this.
Sir Peter is widely known as a World War One aviation buff. This is reflected in two of his non-movie-making enterprises. The first is The Vintage Aviator (http://thevintageaviator.co.nz), located in both Wellington and at a small airfield at Masterton up to the north east, which builds flying replicas of World War One aircraft.
The second of Sir Peter's aviation-related enterprises is Wingnut Wings, which burst onto the modelling scene, completely unheralded, in April 2009. Sir Peter had always been a keen modeller, and had long harboured an ambition to create a kit-making company that would concentrate on highly detailed, accurate, large scale, reasonably priced models of World War One aircraft.
It is difficult for an Australian to say anything kind about New Zealand, given that the Kiwis exhibit the rather tiresome habit of frequently thrashing us at rugby, but I would have to say that the general consensus on my side of the ditch is that Sir Peter and his small Wingnut Wings team in Wellington really aced it. Apart from the beautifully engineered plastic, the full-colour instruction booklets are works of art in themselves. Just what you'd expect from a company that, as Sir Peter himself has said, is “not driven by market forces and profit because it would then become something I don't want it to be.”.
The model is one of Wingnut Wings latest offerings: the Roland D.VIb. OOB except for the EZ Line rigging and Gaspatch turnbuckles.
