The Little World

At my model building club I see many of the other members building models that are a larger scale than the ones I work on.

Up until now I have not thought how much harder their minds must be working – because a lot of the things that are just omitted from my 1:72 aircraft are there in horrifying detail in their kits. I will respect them a lot more now – seeing them threading the control cables through their fuselages and dusting under their wing rivets.

The 1:32 Triumph is no ultra-detail kit – we’re talking an AIrfix starter set, after all – but it poses questions that need to be answered. Cars have interior upholstery and headliners and engine compartments and all – and if you hope to show these in a larger scale you need more information on them than the maker supplies.

The internet is the source – you google up the car and hope that someone has done a walk-round at a car show. Or that there are historic photos of the real thing in real time. Unfortunately you get to see the hot rodded specials and done-ups that have attracted the photographer’s eye – not the factory-standard jobs. It can be a hour worth of searching before you find out what the headliner looked like or whether the wheel wells were body colour or an undercoat.

The only comfort with this is the variety that has taken over the real car world. If you get one surface wrong there are few to say it never happened then – given that it may have happened since.

But what has this to do with the heading image; the paint, cement, and brush section of the kit. Nothing. Because the only things that have been retained from this section are the brushes and cement.

The paint pots are plastic things that obviously could not seal the material adequately – each one had long dried to a hard rime. They were thrown away instantly. Fortunately I had intended to use regular Mr Color lacquers anyway, but the quality contrast between this starter set and those from Revell and IBG is stark.

Their paints are acrylic, too, but they come in sealed jars that mean they are still usable – and in fact are pretty nice brush colours in themselves. Airfix/Humbrol really shoot themselves in their styrene foot with these old paints – any kid encountering them would be bitterly disappointed, and might judge the rest of the hobby not worth pursuing.