F is for Fish'er Eagle!

Following my comment on Moonbase about another item from Eagle (I miss-remembered the page count!) Brian B kindly sent the relevant section from New York of/from whichever Eagle Annual it was, and here it is for everyone else to enjoy as it's literally stuffed with low-cost, old-school, good ideas, some of which I've employed in the past.

I have made wire trees, I haven't made an eight-foot length of railway-cutting! I suspect (well, let's be honest, due to some clues in the text I 'assume') the 'piece' is a collecting-together of twelve weekly or monthly parts, and I have a tatty set of the pages somewhere in the archive, but Brian's are very clean.

'Strip wood' . . . from a time before the invention of Plastruct or styrene-rod or '20-thou' sheets! I've had a stab at wire fences, matchstick corrals and paneling from old weathered ply as mentioned the other week in a News, Views . . .

This was the page I remembered the most, as I was never convinced the colour 'target' would be anything more than a rather psychedelic target! Compare the roof drawings with those of Terry Wise in his Introduction to Battle Gaming if you're lucky enough to have the latter.

Part two of the lake and you start to see how it could work if you airbrushed the 'target' and used a dark blue textured glass, or some glass-paint (which I have some bottles of somewhere, probably contemporary with these drawings, but the lids have been stuck-on for the 40-odd years they have been in my possession, so not much use except for purposes of nostalgia!

While the cabins would look good in a Wild West scenario?

If you do four instead of two and butt them to the edges of the cover-plates in pairs you'd have an equally convincing box-girder bridge? The 'American' design is equally good for post-war Europe where so much infrastructure was lost during the hostilities these simple, utilitarian, 'post-modern' types (often pre-formed concrete 'kits') were common.

I tried the barrels . . . made a complete pigs-ear of it, although I think the 'best one' survives somewhere in the stash! I had more success with the coal-load, and you can also do tarpaulin covers by putting the paper over the outside, and folding the ends across (after cutting to an oblong) like a parcel. Once you've folded and before you glue, attach button-thread to 'tie-down' the corners.

In fact these days you could print-out GC-overprinted 'private owner' branded tarp's?

I also have (from some dodgy auction lot) a whole load of crafted telegraph poles like those illustrated, in spot-soldered steel rod and wire and I think many of the early model-railway shops would have a half-a-stab at commercialising this kind of thing, once they'd got a jig set up (holding/placing pins in a piece of balsa or boxwood), they could produce identical units quite quickly?

Notice also; to the left of the telegraph poles . . .

. . . the clever moniker of the artist; Walkden Fisher. . . and the driver of this post's title!

Many thanks to Mr Berke for this blast from the past, it always brings back memories to flick-through these, the annual from which they are taken was all I had to read during a period of childhood illness/bed-rest . . . flu or something?