The Little World

Every scale model build has One Moment…

This one came when the last of the painting was done, the decals were on and sealed. and the time had come to cement on the windscreen. It was missing.

Clear parts are my bugbear. I have cracked them, stepped on them, fogged, and lost them. They’ve disappeared into the detritus of the workbench and I suspect some have gone into the bin for ever more.

This one had been carefully dry-fitted, then sealed into the original small plastic bag, then sealed into the large plastic bag, then put into the box. When it was found to be missing, I started to wonder if I had picked up a curse somewhere.

You normally search the floor for escaping styrene prisoners, but what do you do when the whole box and two bags goes fugitive? You search each shelf in each room in the house. and if you have a studio, you do the same there. And then you despair and start planning to make a scratch-built screen out of clear shirt-box pieces…until something prompts you to look under the table in the studio but on the seat of a chair pushed into it.

Voila. How? Why? Whom? I cannot say, and may never know. Suffice it that the screen got back to the front of the cockpit and I slept peacefully.

Note for those who think they have seen that nose before – it is the same as the Fairchild PT-19 Cornell trainer. I long for a good model of that plane, but the ancient Revell version is not that.