Is your favourite scale model manufacturer playing with you?
Have they moulded a practical joke in their latest offering? Are they laughing at you in the lunchroom?
You may be forgiven for asking this unpleasant question if you have just opened a $ 250 kit that has three parts and a decal sheet made of cloth. Or one with 1500 parts that will eventually become a small tricycle. And you definitely suspect evil when your model tank kit has 5 parts per track link.
Not every design decision is meanness…some are just folly. Decisions that get so far along the manufacturing process that they cannot be altered. Decisions that become known, then cursed, then notorious. Eventually they are dismissed as part of the charm of the kit…long after it is put of production.
I like to think that some of the things the Czechs have produced are jokes…the impossible PE parts that cannot be detached from the fret, let alone bent or connected. Ditto for some of the tiny chips of resin on their sprue block. They seem to mould blade antennae that way that could just as easily have been injected or cut out of an Evergreen strip.
When a trap means that something cannot fit – no matter how much sanding, fettling, or distorting you resort to – it is time to decide whether it was ever really meant to do so in the first place. I have seen this with exhaust systems in aero engines. When you finally realise that it IS impossible the sense of betrayal is palpable.
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