The Little World

In fact, if they have special on nuthin in Bunnings, buy two extra packets.

For my overseas readers, Bunnings is an Australian DIY store. It sells everything that the average man or woman needs to get themselves in big trouble in the home workshop. You can buy poisons, sharp knives, and the sort of machinery that will kill you. Plus a sausage in a bun on Saturday mornings. If they sold beer I would never leave.

But the nuthin’ I write about today was an old jig system I cobbled up out of scrap wood and foam board. It let me support my model aircraft for assembly and decal application before I got the classy Vertigo jigs from Slovakia. The old cheap jig was put up on a workshop shelf and forgotten. A couple of times I contemplated tossing it during a workshop clean-up.

Thank goodness for miserliness and inertia. Today it starred in a painting job.

Inspired by a club-mate – Andy Hameister uses a jig that holds printed circuit boards to similarly support model car chassis as he paints and assembles them – I pulled down the old jig and set it to hold the new Dassault Super Mystere I am painting. The SM has an open front and back so a couple of foam blocks could be stuffed into the holes and nails pushed through the foam board to trap the plane.

It allowed the entire assembly to rotate like a pig on a spit while the clear lacquer was sprayed on it. Between coats there was no handling and no risk of fingerprints.

Not the sort of idea you could apply to tail-dragger WW1 planes, but a jet is perfect for it.