The Little World

There is more than one way to skin a cat, but you’d be wise not to tell this to pet owners.

However, if you are a scale modeller there are a number of solutions to common problems that appear if you are prepared to think outside the box. Or, in the case of old Airfix kits, the little bag.

a. Is your kit so badly warped that neither side of the hull, body, or fuselage is straight? Can you never mate the two parts without a vast gap? Well…don’t.

Build the right hand side of the kit as one aircraft and the left hand side as another. Or do a car in two colour schemes…or a ship at two points in its career. Then mount the two half-models in a good picture frame and hang it on the wall. This ploy is aided by the fact that most plane kits come with multiple markings.

b. If your canopy is missing, tarp it over. Or, if only one half is gone, build a crash diorama and just use what you have.

c. If there are cat hairs in your final gloss varnish finish, and you don’t have a cat, you are cursed. Go see an exorcist.

d. If you have lost a vital landing gear part on the floor and cannot make or buy another one, close up the gear and put the model on as fancy a plinth as you can make or buy. If it’s a prop plane leave off the blades and substitute a circle of clear acetate as a prop.

e. If the windows of your kit are so bad that they are going to spoil the entire thing,. seal ’em in and paint them gloss black. Sure, it is a convention, but you can have a lot of fun at conventions, particularly the ones in Las Vegas.

f. If your prize model plane developed an unfixable crack or ghost seam, get a bottle of black paint and go to the nearest air force base or airport and paint a similar fault on the full-size prototype. No one can say yours is not correct.

g. If your careful minimal weathering job on the tank has slowly taken on the aspect of a monster and gained so many layers of wash, oil, putty, pigment, and house dust that you cannot actually see any of the panel lines, rivets, or tracks, load up your airbrush with methylated spirits and blast the thing from all sides for five minutes. Then shake it and let it dry in the shade.

You’d be surprised how good it looks after you wash away all the expensive Spanish modelling finishes. You won’t get any money back from the hobby shop, but you may discover a tank under there.