The Little World

The world seems to be divided into two camps – those who don’t care about Brexit, and those who don’t care about Justin Trudeau. There are a few of us who have sought to bridge the gap and heal the rift by not caring about both subjects at the same time. Given a cup of coffee and a plate of home-made scones, this is a good position to be in.

Not so easy to heal, however, is the dichotomy between those modellers who approach the cementation of their plastic model with rubber gloves, an OOOO paintbrush, and the barest whisper of extra thin Tamiya…and those who load a garden sprayer with Humbrol Poly and just hose down the inside of the kit box as soon as it is opened. Both sides refuse to see the justice of the other. There are sneers and mutterings.

I am not a glue guru. I do not know the chemical composition of the various brands and could not quote the viscosity numbers from a table. But I’ll bet there are people who could, and if you were unwise enough to ask them a question…would. You make the mistake, you reap the punisment.

But I am getting to be a two-sides-of-the-bread man when it comes to some of the plastic kits I deal with – and this is happening more and more. I’ll explain.

Once I was a pure Poly or Testors or Revell cement man…when I was just a boy. It was all we had and we learned the hobby squeezing tin tubes of the stuff through various nozzles. We learned to be sparing and cautious when squeezing and even more cautious when opening a new tube on a hot day. There were casualties as we finger-glued fuselages and hulls and canopies, but if we stuck to the hobby for a while we stopped sticking to the parts.

Toothpicks, pins, cocktail sticks, and matchsticks all came into play to steer the cement to the places we wanted it. We learned to use PVA glue, and eventually cyanoacrylate cements. Our learning curve steepened with this latter material but eventually we stopped sticking to the furniture.

We graduated to the super-thin liquid cements in bottles and thought that we would never need the tubes again. We were wrong. In any average model there are joints that definitely benefit from both types. You want to hide what you have done, surely, but before you hide it, you’ve actually got to have  achieved an adequate bond. I failed to do this a couple of nights ago when I left a cemented model to set overnight. It set, but fell apart next day – the super thin stuff just did not bridge the gaps that existed between the parts.

So I’ve taken to looking critically at what the joint will do – and where I can see that there is a need for maximum strength I revert to either the tube Poly cement or the Mr Cement Delux medium viscosity mix. If I use this I coat each side of a joint before assembling. The grab is very much speeded-up and the end result a much stronger joint. Just make sure that when you place one softened surface on another that they are exactly where you wish them to be…because there is no prising some of the joints apart.

I did the fuselage that way – then the wings on their spars – then the nacelles – then the tailplane and lastly the vertical stabilisers. Bless Airfix for making surfaces that mate together accurately and that end up square and plumb. I can have confidence to finish it well.