The Little World

When we set out stockpile materials, kits, plans, money, and tools with a hazy vision of one day making the grande supremo opus de-luxe  model…we condemn ourselves to a lifetime of anxiety. For how will we know when that ultimate opportunity arrives? When can we open the secret vault door and bring out the ” good  stuff ” to build with? What if we peak too soon? What if we leave it too late? Arrrrgh!

The answer, of course, is to be as impetuous as you can. As soon as you find an opportunity to use the special cast parts, the custom paint jar, or the really, really good obeche stripwood, you should haul it out and use it. Even if you suspect that it might be wildly too good for whatever project is at hand, go ahead and cut and glue,. You never can tell – the effort you make may be the touch that makes a mediocre model into an excellent result.

No-one ever improved a good model by using third-rate ingredients.

By the same token, you cannot blame your failures entirely upon the materials. Okay, if you essay to make a model of a Phantom jet fighter out of dried beef jerky strips, you are going to have to be prepared at the end to see some pretty strange contours and surfaces. The model will neither fly nor look good. But the dog will follow you around, hypnotized and sniffing. You have one fan, at least.

If you are a bad builder, the best materials will still end up looking bad. The only saving grace will be they will probably not have been hard to work – good fresh wood, plastic, metal, etc is infinitely easier to deal with than dirty salvaged scrap. It even makes better scrap, if you are building weathered junk.

We all know this, and this is the source of that universal urge to save the good stuff for later.

I will admit that some materials now are not as good as they may once have been – good clear white pine and obeche strip is a case in point. If you can get it, it is astronomically priced, and frequently all that is offered is third-rate. Yet other items like styrene, whitemetal, and resin parts are wonderfully well made. The hobby shop is truly a mixed bag.

I’m brought to this subject while building some scale structures to house my growing airplane collection. I needed windows and set out to print them on Pictorico inkjet medium. It worked well, but the packet ran out with only half the windows done – and the only source of the stuff is a photographic warehouse in New York City – the shipping is as much as the price of the material. As I am trying to economise so as to be able to build a bigger layout with the available funds, I needed to look around.

Fortunately I happened upon one of my rainy day stashes – clear acetate sheet embossed with square lines that can be painted to simulate a framed window. I bought out the supplies of a hobby shop that wanted to quit doll house materials and was prepared to dump the sheets for half price. They are wonderful but in reality as cheap as chips. All they needed was to have the frame lines painted as window frames – and I did this with enamel paint pens. There is probably no more of this plastic stuff to be had in Perth, but as I had a need now and the opportunity, I did not hesitate to spend the good stuff.