The Little World

Wash your Handley Page. If you won’t do it carefully, just do it for the Halifax…

We all need to wash our mitts more these days to prevent the transmission of the Wuhan Plague and hopefully we will all do so – but what we really need to do is wash our model kits better.

None of us old timers ever used to do this. We’d rush home with the Airfix baggie, wrench the parts off the sprue trees, and be gluing before the door slammed shut. When it came time to paint things, the Humbrol or Revell paints we used were powerful enough to adhere to anything – you could have got a coat of Gloss Insignia Yellow onto Pierre Trudeau and it would have stuck. ( To be fair, A lot would stick to a Trudeau in those days. Now…)

But times is changed and modern paints are delicate flowers. Good if you are prepared to undercoat, overcoat, and all the rest. You can even expect to see the riveting detail after you finish. But there are times when mysterious bare patches will appear where you least expect them and nothing you can do actually covers them up. I call it The Chromatic Triangle and airliners have vanished in there…

I wash my kits in warm water in a steel bowl in the sink. I put the perforated sink plug in place so that escapees from the sprue trees cannot make a run for it. I can think of nothing worse than trying to get a clear canopy out of the sink trap.

The warm water gets a dash of washing-up detergent. I scrub over the parts with my fingers. I rinse with warm clean water and dry the parts overnight in a warm box. And still mysterious bare patches can appear.

The worst offenders for this are some of the Hobby Boss kits from China. They have complicated slip-moulding machines to make the easy-build kits and these may need more release agent than others to let the process flow. I guess I am just missing some of this agent. I have no idea what it might actually be, but I’m guessing something with silicone.

Time to rethink the business. Either I start using a toothbrush to scrub more thoroughly – and risk dislodging smaller parts – or I put whole sections of sprue tree into an ultrasonic bath. Or I start to swab the model before painting with some form of acidic wipe.

Experiment time. Open the roof and bring on the lightning, Igor…