EDITORIAL

Dear Friends and Modellers!

I must confess that I began writing this introduction to the newsletter back at the end

of November, immediately after I finished the

intro to the November newsletter. My clever

plan was to put together the introduction

before Christmas, add a small bit on Donald

Finlay, write the text to the Spitfire Mk.IIa, buy

some presents, and then just waste my time

good n’ well until January 4th. It was a well

thought out plan that basically worked out,

except that on December 19th, just as I finished making myself a cup of Flat White and

prepared to fine tune my intro text, the phone

rang. Instead of what I was expecting, which

was the latest on who in the firm had tested

positive for covid, I was informed that our people were evacuated from the building that is

our warehouse and mailing department, because there seems to be something burning

there. So, once again, it has been proven that

ignorance is a state of bliss while the universe

is actually pointing a gun right between your

eyes. I left the coffee on the table and I covered the 18km between Litvinov and Most

in record time, and I arrived at thirty minutes

after the call came into the fire department.

There was smoke coming from the warehouse

portion, and from the ground, it didn’t look all

that bad. When the black smoke turned white, it looked good, under the circumstances,

but that was just wishful thinking, as it turned

out. Soon, the fire seemed to have found its

second wind, and spread through the entire floor, destroying nearly one million plastic sprue frames and a four month supply of

model boxes. In our case, that is really a lot

of boxes. And they burn real good, too. At the

moment when the fire picked up again, I was

saying goodbye in my mind to not only all of

our sprue part supplies, but also other components and finished products that were stored in the mail area. That is on the first floor

of the building, and at the height of the fire,

it didn’t look possible for anything to survive

there. Fortunately, when the fire was extinguished, it became clear that the situation was

much better, and the losses much less, than

would have been expected after viewing the

whole affair from the outside. No small thanks

goes out to the firefighters, who were able to

localize the fire and keep it in the upper level,

and to the steel and concrete structure of the

building hailing from the beginning of the 20th

century. As the head firefighter said, had this

been a modern industrial building, it would

have burned right down to its foundation.

This building didn’t make it easy for the fire to

spread to other sections, and perhaps surprisingly, there was not a significant amount of

water damage, either. The water generally flowed down the stairwells, where, shortly after

the fire had been extinguished, they looked

like mountain streams. It may not have been

crystal clear, but the water was up to almost

the knees. The end result is that things that

missed being sent out through the mail system on the Friday before the fire, stored in the

left side of the building, escaped the flames

unscathed. They may have the distinct smell

of burned styrene, but hopefully, this can be

aired out. Items in the mail room proper and

the retail department suffered some damage

from the water coming down from the upper floors, but this damage is relatively minor.

After we were given the go-ahead to re-enter

the building by the fire department, we moved most goods to the neighboring hall. At the

moment, remediation is being carried out on

both damaged halls, the burned out second

floor and the flooded first floor. However, it

appears that once the building is inspected

and the electrical wiring is certified, the retail

and mail departments will be back to normal.

This week will be dedicated to moving everything back, and the week after will be used to

get the mail room into operation again, including the restart of our e-shop. The supply of

photoetching, masks, Brassins and Gunze will

be normal. We haven’t got any plastic, or at

least not for everything, so what will probably

be affected for several months will be the catalog of kits. We will supply the new releases

for the current month and for the one after,

in this case, February. After that, we will build

up stock in a flow against time, so first will

be items released in December, 2020, then

November, 2020, and with them, related

products. So, for example, the Spitfire Mk.Ia

ProfiPACK, and Spitfire Story: The Few will tag

along with Spitfire Mk.IIa ProfiPACK, being

readied for February. It will be the same for

the Mustangs. We have to renew the P-51D-5

Weekend kit, which was to have been packed

this week, but who’s plastic went, quite literally, up in smoke. So, we need to mould the

Mustang. And while we will be churning out

D-5 plastic, we’ll do all of them, including the

Mustang Mk.IV planned for May. You dig?

That takes care of the most pressing of

things, and we can turn to the original contents of the newsletter introduction. This will

concern to a large extent, changes that this

year will bring us. One of our goals, which

changes are beginning to affect, is the newsletter itself. In November, we initiated an editing

team made up of myself, Jan Zdiarsky, Jan

Bobek, Petr Stepanek and Richard Plos. Our

goal is to improve the aesthetic quality of this

material and bring it up to a printable form.

You read right. Although paper is today considered an outdated medium, there are those

among us that simply prefer to read things on

a hard copy. And I won’t deny that I am one

of them. Computer versions of books were at

one time considered a great Christmas gift,

but I, myself, have never read a book on one.

Mine was inherited by my mother-in-law. Demand for a hard copy of the Newsletter is still

there, despite the fact that everyone can theoretically print one off themselves. Or just print

out the pages they find interesting. But I must

admit that getting a printed version of some

4 eduard

INFO Eduard - January 2021