The Little World

Or excess oranges…squeeze them and refine the oil from the peel. Then bottle it and sell it as model building cement. Or food flavouring. Or whatever – just get the customer to give you the money.

Whether the resultant oily liquid makes good cakes or sticks model airplanes together effectively is irrelevant. As long as you get the money…

If this seems a little bitter, ( bitter orange? ), it is because I spent ten bucks on a bottle of citrus cement and it doesn’t work worth a damn. Oh, it is pleasant to smell, and repeated exposure to it mars the surface of a plastic model all right…but as far as getting the kit parts to unite in good time and stay stuck long enough to set, you might as well be using olive oil.

Fortunately a fellow modeller mentioned that we can purchase Methyl Ethyl Ketone in a convenient form at our local DIY warehouse. It’s the cleanser for PVC pipe work. At $ 4.50 for double the amount of limonene cement it is already looking good and a workshop trial has proved that it is brilliant at doing the job. The bottle I purchased has a red dye incorporated to show you where it has run to – but it is as good as the Tamiya extra-thin cement for capillary action and penetration.

Yes. I know it has a bad reputation for being a dangerous chemical, but so, I suspect, does about half the contents of my workshop. Sensible application is the key to success. To aid in this I decanted the limonene cement…into the drain…washed the applicator bottle, and filled it up with the MEK. When my regular bottle of Tamiya extra thin is used up I’ll change that over to MEK and have done with it all.

So the day has not been a complete loss.