Supermodel

Many of us in younger days will have had a bash at making a scale model - in fact so dominant was one particular brand that for your average Brit of a certain age it was simply known as making an Airfix model.

The new box. The neatly packaged sprues - grey for normal, clear for canopies and lights perhaps even a chrome one for trim items. The oh so important instructions, and the decals. The decals. So often my nemesis. Petite beautiful and delicate they were also inclined to fold up on themselves and break quicker than an actress on a speedball. But most of all a new airfix kit held the promise of doing this one right! No smears of glue on the inside of the cockpit this time, no delicate moving mechanisms rendered a solid glob of glue and fingerprints.

I did get better and absorbed some good tips from a family friend, an adult no less who made beautiful Airfix models of commercial airliners... ...use liquid cement instead of the tube of snot provided, and try and paint as much as possible on the sprue before construction begins.

There has always been a niche for dedicated modelmakers who finish their models with an obsessive amount of skill and now thanks to the internet we can see just how much work they put in. This photoset of a Tamiya brand scale model of Rossi's '04 Yamaha M1 is quite simply astonishing. Two things stand out; there is clearly a market for model kit 'upgrades' - higher quality elements of the kit made with more detail and superior materials, and this particular modeller is obsessed with accuracy and quality.

Stunning stuff.