The Little World

I used to wonder at some of the kits I saw in the hobby shop – kits that seemed to be of such mundane subjects that I didn’t think anyone would ever be interested.

Wrong. Wrong on many levels. I got the first indication of this when I saw the late, great, John Evans building a Revell model of a North Sea oil drilling platform. It was an old kit he hauled out in his final months and I am sorry to say it did not get finished. Perhaps a club member will step in and finish it.

The Trumpeter 40 foot sea container could have been a dud. I mean, who wants to model something they can see going down Leach Highway every day? Particularly if they are stuck behind a truck hauling one…the next horror will be someone kitting a Liquid Salvage truck…

Well, I’m foolish enough to think I need a 40 foot container in my diorama and lucky enough that Hobbytech had one on the shelf. No-one else ever wanted it, but that is my good fortune.

Trumpeter kits sometimes get a mixed review, but I’m going to say that I admire their style. The castings are perfect, the design is ambitious, and the result is believable. Plastic’s a bit brittle, but you find that out early on and make allowances.

I was stuck inside on an iso week, so this kit got my attention. A fortunate warmish, dry-ish spell let me paint it and I was able to use up paint dregs to do it. Win/win.

The Trumpeter folks are ambitious and would have you make the plug door mechanism exactly as the prototype…but it doesn’t fit that well. Suffice it to say, it fits well enough for jazz. If I can locate a 20′ foot model I’ll try to make it with an opened door.

And final judgement says that common prototypes are as rewarding as exotic ones. If anything, we can be more critical of something we see every day on the roads than something that is only a memory in a magazine photo. We can mix our own paints from the real example.

And the club anorak will tell us it’s wrong…