The Little World

I don’t know. Do they ever grasp their latest Victorian parlour settee model and fling it against the wall? Is there a flood of unparliamentary language? Perhaps – they are human after all. I sympathise, and do not wish them endless failure.

But I do wish them a bit of it – and I hope it strikes them early on in the project. And then I wish them the gumption and character to pick up the pieces, cement them together again, and make a new settee-cover.

I fail frequently. I joke about making a new error each time I make a model airplane…but it is not a joke. Every build has a mistake somewhere in it, like a Persian rug. The trick is to fail early…and make each mistake once.

Once.

I lose parts when I build kits. They go missing as I test fit them and put them back in the box. Sometimes they come back and sometimes not. If they are small parts from early on I can live without them – if they are major bits at the end I need to do a lot of fancy footwork to recover from the situation.

Failures have sometimes been multiple, which makes me culpable. I’ve tried some security measures to prevent it and I hope they will succeed.

I also fail when I cut an item free from a sprue tree or try to cement it and it pings off into the 9th dimension. As yet, I have no viable solution to this save that of making a second part to replace the one gone. In some cases this leads to the discovery of the stray, but never until the new scratch-built part is firmly attached.

Drawing on my experience in photography, I suspect all hobbies fail in some wise. Car builders and shooters and macrame weavers have their heartbreaks, I’m sure. Let us hope they can all buck up and carry on.