The Little World

A gripping story…

The best tool I ever purchased from Stanbridges was a set of clamps by Xacto. The buy was in 1974 when Stanbridges was Stanbridges and Xacto was Xacto…

The clamps are made of metal, though I often wonder which one. I would have guessed aluminium but lately I’m not so sure. Originally there were four in the set, in different sizes, but they were made with enough precision that you could use them as setting-up jigs for wooden boat formers. Gradually over the years they have corroded and bent out of shape – rather like their owner. But I still need them with the plastic models because there are still things that clothes pegs and plastic clamps will not do.

And therein lies the rub – there are more shapes in scale modelling than square, and more stresses found assembling a plastic model than you’d get at Parliament House during tax time. You can do it manually, but if you need to do it for longer than about three minutes, you need some form of clamp. And the clamps rarely want to push or pull in the same direction as your fingers.

I hear people advocate rubber bands around wings and fuselages – or masking tape. But I also hear these same modellers cry when the ultra-thin cement they put on the seam runs out and under the band or tape. It is always tempting fate to snug things up close to the seam

For myself, I use a range of aids:

a. Plastic clamps

These will hold foam board and wood stringers well but tend to slip off of everything else. I think they are intended for flying model builders working in balsa.

b. The dear old Xacto clamps

Fading now, but occasionally the only thing that will screw a distorted fuselage together.

c. Plastic clothes-pegs.

Introduced to me by John Evans, these are the cheap go-to for most wing, tail, and fuselage closures. But because fuselages are compound curves, there are two tricks that you need to know:

1. Form a small roll of masking tape – sticky side out – and use it to give some purchase to the clothes-peg. The rubber end of the peg will grip to a certain extent, but you can always increase that.
2. If you need to reduce the force with which the peg grips, piggy-back it with another one. This will close a fuselage without distorting the seam.

d. Painting clips

Not merely for spray-painting, these alligator clips will hold small parts together for cementation and keep your fingers out of the way.

I also suspect there are things you could do with magnets, but I’ve not experimented yet. Packets of these are available from Jaycar or other electronics shops so go out there and make a nuisance of yourself.