The Little World

The awkward sound of scale models breaking is one that you never want to hear, but that you are bound to encounter at sometime in your hobby career. If you are lucky, it will be you breaking your own kit, and no one else involved.

Unfortunately there is more than one kind of luck.

I saw an incident yesterday at our scale model club that was very sad. We have been engaged in moving display cabinets and scale models from one side of the club premises to the other – this is the second week of renovations and I expect there’ll be another one to go.

The new ceiling and lighting look very nice and all will be well with the room structures in the end, but the models are suffering a little. You cannot move over a hundred of them repeatedly without some damage, and the damage accumulates. I noted a couple of models with loose wheels, axles, or suspensions an one poor F1 Honda is in bits.

The worst incident happened on the second moving day when a cabinet full of very expensive large-scale models was being put onto two wheeled trolleys. It was late in the day and the chaps concerned decided to take the shortcut of not emptying the cabinet before jacking it up.

I was 15 feet away from it when the noise occurred – the cabinet had tilted and three of the models fell out on the floor. The masts, superstructures, wheels, and landing gear gave way instantly. The models are the pride of one of the most dedicated club members. I can only imagine his sadness when being told of the mishap.

What to do?. There is more moving and stacking to do next week, I think a couple of senior members should review the situation now and gather together any fragments of the displays for future repairs. Bag ’em and set a repair team to work when all the danger is over. What cannot be re-cemented can be re-made.

The Japanese have an art of repair – time we learned it.