The Little World

I am in constant state of admiration when I see the modelling stations of truly professional scale builders. The green cutting mats, the neat rows of paint bottles, and the tools lined up in order of size and/or political opinion. It just thrills me and makes me want to put on a pair of heavy boots and kick the other hobbyist.

My own workbench does have organisation, but then so does the bat guano cavern in Mammoth Cave. And it smells better.

I did not start out to be messy…I had a vision of rows of gleaming instruments and space-age machinery much like my surgery when I was a dentist. But then I was forced to remember that my equipment was only new 32 years before I sold the practice off and by then there were some pretty antique bits of gear. And that included the staff. So maybe the Little Workshop is not such a pit after all.

I am forced, however, to be ashamed of the state of the cutting mat . Whenever I see video presentations at Flory models or on other sites they have these pristine green cutting mats with precise little white gridwork inscribed on it. You have confidence that whaterver is boing done on them is exactly right. There’s never a spot of paint or a gouge mark to be seen.

In my case I opted for a little tan-coloured Tamiya mat that had circles and diagram printed on it, but many of these went in the first fine flush of painting solvents, leaving a murky disfigured thing that looks like an Edvard Munch painting…but not so cheerful. There are dried glue lumps there that defy removal and make cutting a straight line impossible. I would go buy a green mat if I wasn’t certain that it would look exactly the same in a week.

The saving grace for the LW is the big whiteboard that I scored from the wife that is used as a construction plane for the buildings and aircradft. It’s washable and durable and has so far remained flat and smooth. I can base the erection of a kit on it and get the wings and tailplane at 90º to each other. At the next train modelling exhibition I am going to try to buy a couple of cheap steel or aluminium engineering squares to use as physical references for this.

But I must be careful when I go to the tool sellers’ stand. Like a trip to the DIY shop, every turn brings sight of something that I’ve never seen before but dearly must have. And everything is in multiples of $ 10 bills.