The Little World

I’m gonna hang out the washing on the Mildenhall Line…and so on. Dad’s Air Force musters again.

Today is washing day for the two new kits – the Grumman TBF-1 and the Boeing Fortress Mk III. I have beautiful weather for it – bone dry and a very modest 27º C temperature in the shed. I can lay out the scrubbed sprues without fear of heat warping them. And no wind to blow dust into the place. – all it needs is patience and me being elsewhere.

The business of washing off parting agents and oils is new to me. As a kid modeller I would never have heard of the practice – and given the state of my fingers at the time, the exercise would largely have been futile. Even now I wonder if I am expected to wear surgical gloves to handle the thing from this point on. I could do that, given 40 years experience in the surgery, but I’m darned if I will. There is a point where it all becomes too much.

I must say I am pleased with the way kits glue together these days – given the right cement and enough mating or bearing surface in the mouldings – and I cannot complain that there has been any failure in the paint caused by beading up or grease. So the precaution of scrubbing the sprues would seem to be working, and helping for no extra money spent. Mind you, I do attend to the business of a good undercoat or primer on all the builds.

In the olden days ( American Revell, Elvis, dinosaurs…) paints went on pretty well too – because they weren’t acrylics and whatever they were was pretty fierce. I well remember the odour of 1950’s Revell paints in their tiny glass bottles. It was totally different from anything else – Pactra, Testors, Humbrol, etc. I suspect it was a lacquer solvent mixture. Nowadays they wouldn’t sell it because there wouldn’t be enough space on the glass bottle for all the Californian health alerts to be printed.

As an aside – California warning against harmful chemicals in model kit paints…California with the LA smog…Is someone putting their Californian tongue in their West Coast cheek?

Well, the day will be silent and comfortable out in the Little Workshop. I have completed a Frugal Week with the construction of two card buildings and the official Kit Week doesn’t start until Monday. The rest of today and Sunday may be spent in shop cleaning or sorting parts off spuues into their appropriate spare part container.

I’ve heard someone say that saving your spares is foolish and a waste of time. I know different – I’ve saved builds when something in a kit went missing and I’ve made scratchbuilt structures look 100% better with spares box parts. No wise farmer throws away good organic material and the same applies to scale model makers.