The runway that taught us to leave gaps
Look closely at the edge of our runway and you will see the yellow lines are broken. Short segments, with a clear gap where one tile meets the next. A real airfield does not do that. Its boundary lines run solid, end to end, and the first version of ours did too.
Then we built it.
Here is what happens. Sixteen tiles in a row, each one placed by hand, each sticker cut out with scissors and laid on by eye. Get one of them a single degree out of true, which you will, and a solid line becomes a visible zigzag running the whole length of the runway. Nothing else about the build is wrong. The one crooked sticker is all anyone sees.
Why one crooked sticker matters
So we broke the lines up. Each tile’s segment now stops a fraction short of both ends, which means every seam lands in a small gap rather than in the middle of a stripe. Up close you can still spot the tile that sits slightly proud. Along the length of the runway, you cannot, and the runway is the thing people look at.
It cost us a little authenticity and bought back a lot of tidiness. We would make the same trade again.
What is actually on the sheets
The Airfield is runway 09/27 with a parallel taxiway, twenty four studs wide and forty eight long. Threshold piano keys, runway designators, touchdown zone bars, aiming points, centreline dashes, side stripes, displaced threshold arrows, a hold short bar, board signs, and a segmented circle sitting out on the grass.
Seventy stickers, and eighteen spares. The spares are not a bonus. On a kit a spoiled sticker stops the build, so they are part of the product.
A kit, not a sheet
Everything else we make is a sheet. You buy the coffee shop stickers and you decide where each one goes. A menu on that wall, a portrait of Brenda behind the counter, a price board by the till. There is no wrong answer, and choosing is half the fun. The same is true of the road and traffic signs.
The Airfield is different, because the stickers make one specific thing. That changes what has to come in the box. It ships with a two page build guide carrying the tile map and the finished layout, a complete sticker list, and a tile bill split by size and by colour: a hundred and fifty two tiles, a hundred and eleven Dark Bluish Grey and forty one Green.
We do not supply the tiles. We do tell you exactly which ones to order, because you could not work that out from the sheets alone, and nobody wants to discover they are four greys short halfway through.
If you are an aviation enthusiast and the broken lines had been bothering you, now you know. We would rather be slightly wrong about a real airfield than let your runway look crooked.
