The Little World

Or ” How I Learned To Overcome Despair “.

It is just as well that I do most ob my building these days in 1:72 or 1:76. If I chose larger scales I would inevitably run up against a plastic kit that had been manufactured in 1823 and then my level of frustration and angst would go through the roof. I still have little hot spots with the older kits but they are small affairs – no boil-overs.

It is not as if the makers of historic models wanted to be bad. Pyro, Lindberg, Aurora, Frog, Airfix all made crude things in their early days, but they were just starting out the hobby and learning how to do it. As kids we accepted what we got as far better than we could carve out of balsa wood and never noticed the seams, sinks, and savage inaccuracies that existed. We were not perturbed by cast insignia on wings, nore did we complain about thick canopies.

But things have changed – they’ve gotten better, and in some cases far, far, better. If we have been lucky enough to build some of the major Japanese or Chinese kits, we can appreciate just how good plastic castings can be. We might laugh at he voluminous instruction sheets that are crammed with cartoon admonishments, but the basic kits are superb. In some cases they are superb for bargain prices, too.

How shall we feel, then when we pick a brightly-presented kit from the shelf by a major maker like AIrfix – new red box, new box art, a promise of new decals and colour…and then find that we have a 1970’s or 80’s reshot from old moulds…and find that we are looking at sink marks, flash, distorted parts, short shots, and missing parts. And all these faults on top of crude raised rivet and panel lines that make the product look toy-like. In some cases we are paying a goodly modern price for this disappointment.

I do watch ” Scalemates ” web site for information about the age and the state of re-issue kits, but sometimes I do not watch carefully enough. Or I am forced to accept what is available in the shops, knowing that better goods that might be reviewed will never make it to my town. I have to grit my teeth and open the box hoping for the best.

Hey, sometimes the surprise is a pleasant one – the Mister Hobby Fairey Fulmar promised to be a dog but turned out to be a showpiece. Likewise many of the cheap Hobby Boss kits. I have a growing respect for them.

Sometimes there are remedies for age and fatigue. I boiled an Airfix Hampden back into shape well enough to build it satisfactorily.

Sometimes there is nothing you can do but suck your teeth and whistle. Life is just…