Category: Miniature Philosophy
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The Plastic Himalayas
Or how to get over the hobby humps. Modellers are camels – we all have humps. whether we are making plastic kits, model railway layouts or doll houses, we come to a point when it all seems too much. Our kit build is stretching out week after week as we fight the photo-etched brass –…
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Use It Or Hoard It?
What do you do with the valuable old kit? If you have been stashing or buying for some time, you will eventually stumble across an unbuilt kit that is actually valuable in some respect: a. It has climbed in resale value as it has aged and other similar kits fallen by the wayside. If you…
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The Glaring Omissions
In hobby shops full of Messerspitstang kits and the space ships of the latest franchise movie, it is actually painful to stride the aisles looking for the missing links. I concentrate most effort on 1:72 scale aircraft and have long built the standards. I’ve built the semi-standards, and a fair few of the obscurities as…
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Get Right Back On The Horse
The iron rule of horse riding is that, after a fall that has not killed you, you get right back on the horse. This has the effect of showing your moxie to the other riders, quelling your fears, and giving you a chance to show the horse that you mean to be the master or…
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Eat All Your Peas
And one of several things will happen: a. You will earn dessert. b. You will be too full of peas to want dessert. c. More peas will served, as you obviously enjoy them. d. You will come to hate peas. e. You will fart like a dog for hours. I like peas, as it happens,…
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The Temptation To Re-Stash
And just when they thought you were cleaning out the old one… Many people I know go through a cycle where they alternately empty and replenish their stashes This conforms to the universal rule of physics that you can never have a completely full shelf nor a completely empty one. There must always be either…
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The Prefab Model
You might justifiably say that all plastic model kits are prefab. If something is moulded and needs no shaping it is the factory modelling – not you. But we all realise that there is a great deal of re-shaping in most kits before any assembly can be contemplated. The sprue tree – that basic component…
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Welcome To The Club
You don’t need to fill out an application form – just sitting there with cement on your fingers and tears streaming down your face is enough. You’re one of us. Now peel that ruined canopy off your jumper and tell us why you decided to do this to yourself. You had a chance to escape.…
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Morality And Styrene Cement
A guide to repentance and the re-enforced joint. As scale modelling sinners we often risk judgement and damnation through our treatment of the innocent…the innocent kit, I mean. Each one of these comes to us pristine and unsullied, unless it has been bought at a stash sale – and in that case anything that happens…
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Do We Read Or Watch?
A good question for scale modellers. We used to have books and magazines to inform our modelling. Increasingly we turn to screens…sometimes to read, as you are doing now…but sometimes to watch an unknown person tell us how to do something or what to think about some subject. The video proceeds at its own pace…
