What BONE HEAD thing have you done in this hobby?

I think my biggest Bone head mistake was taking up the damn hobby in the first place.

Beyond that, i'll have to think on it, just so many.

I glued up the fuselage on an SBD, only to find when I put it back in the box at the end of the work session that the assembled cockpit was still in the box, not the fuselage......ended up using the fuselage as AB practice piece.

Bish - all I can add is an "AMEN"

Bish

I think my biggest Bone head mistake was taking up the damn hobby in the first place.

Beyond that, i'll have to think on it, just so many.

 

PJ, paint in the AB from the day prior and no problems????? That's the luck of the Irish.

My big dummy moment was a slight mask overspray leak, at the top of a 32nd F-14 canopy. Went to clean it with some 71%, didn't look closely enough and used lacquer thinner. Thanks to Revell customer service the replacement came through quickly. Big thanks to them.

Patrick

Painting an entire model Panzer yellow, only to come inside, turn on the light, and notice I had grabbed Afrika Korps brown.  That was the last time I painted in the garage.  The light was feeble, the glare from the street was too much, so I didn't notice the color until too late.

Another incident is more of a "too weird to be true" thing.  I tried blowing some excess decal solvent off a model, and somehow the decal lifted, went airborne, and applied itself to my overhead light fixture.  I searched high and low for the missing decal, but could not find it.  A friend who came over some hours later found the decal in seconds.  But it had already dried and conformed to my light fixture.  Just-like-paint.  I still cannot figure out how that happened.

There's been several for me, but the one that sticks out most in my mind was when I went to open a bottle of paint, I unscrewed the lid slightly then got distracted by something for a few seconds, picked up the paint again, and shook it to mix up the paint.  The paint went just about everywhere.  Most of it landed up on me.  All over my hand, and somehow on my neck.  I spent the next hour in the bathroom scrubbing it off. 

Gosh after hearing your stories I feel better. I guess we all have our moment.

Patrick

I was EXTREMELY surprised when the ab worked. I expected it to be locked up.

Using a hot air gun to speed up the drying of a coat of paint on the rollbar of my USS Reliant. Flash forward a few days later and I'm wondering why the rollbar won't fit correctly, it did a few days ago!!!

Because you warped the darn thing drying the paint !!!!!! You big dummy!!!! Waiting two days to assembly you could have just waited and let the paint dry on its own!

trying to unwarp a wing with warm water,instead i shrunk the part because the water was too hot.

I just got back into the hobby 6 months ago after a 33-year hiatus. I've of course made mistake - let's face it, such a hiatus puts me back into the beginner category (and I wouldn't say I was that great at it as a kid anyway!)

Here's a recent one: I bought a B-1A model a few weeks ago. I opened the box and there were only two sprues with pretty basic parts. "Must be an older model", I thought. I figured, oh well, my current model was giving me a hard time, so why not try an easy one? Famous last words...

It didn't take look for me to realize I was dealing with cheap plastics and parts that didn't fit well together. This wasn't going to be pretty. When the landing gears wouldn't fit, I took a break for a week.

Fast-forward to last night and I decide to finish it. I decide to do it "gears up" (it came with a stand) since the landing gears are a write-off. Well, the "hook" for the stand in the instructions is NOT there. I decide to rig something so the stand can hold the plane safely. I'm so focused on this that I do not realize that I still have a little bit of paint to do, a couple of parts to glue, plus the decals. Then I realized what I had done. Expletives were used.

It's holding well, so I go ahead with the decals. Turns out it wasn't just the plastic that was cheap. A couple of important decals die in the process. Hmmm... OK, I'll just expose the other side on the shelf. I can still save this thing, even though it doen't look that great (remember the ill-fitting parts...)

As I get ready to paint the nose, I scratch one of the large decals (my mistake). Alright, that's it. The plane is in the trash. It already looked pretty bad anyway and I had wasted enough time trying to rescue it.

Lessons learned:

1) Read the instructions more carefully but, above all, DO NOT assume that they are correct
2) Steer clear of boxes that appear old (looks). That was then and this is now; having worked on recent kits, going back to the old stuff just doesn't seem to work for me.

Interestingly, I ran into a review of that kit and the reviewer had no complaints about the quality. Looking closely at the pictures of his build, I'm beginning to wonder if maybe I got some counterfeit kit or the company just decided to reissue the kit and have it made at the cheapest manufacturing facility they could find. Seriously, even thinking back to the 70s I couldn't think of ever having to deal with something like this. I'm OK with taking a big chunk of the blame though - as you read above I did make a number of mistakes and I still have a ways to go before I can feel comfortable doing this stuff.

Anyway, now back to my Airfix Supacat Jackal armoured vehicle. It may be very small with tons of very small parts, but it hasn't annoyed me nearly as much as that seemingly easy to build B-1A.

AHA !

  Mine is about paint too . I had this ( To Me ) gorgeous model car . All it needed was paint . So I went to the hardware store and bought a Big spray can of the color . Medium Wine Metallic .

    It was a very HOT lacquer .The car was styrene . Need I say More ? Never knew that you needed primer back then .  The effect was so unique I wish I could duplicate that surface on interiors in little spots ! Looked just like leather , even to the pebbly finish !

 Now to laugh . I was blowing some excess Super-Glue and setting solution off a model part .The phone rang just then . I jumped and the part was firmly attached to my upper lip ! That made for some interesting close contact with Lacquer Thinner . I was High for an hour ! LOL.LOL.  T.B.

I forgot to mask a canopy once.

Clear paint won't make a painted over canopy clear again.

Everytime I sit down at the bench I seem to do something stupid.  Yesterday, I was masking off the red stripes on red and white marking on the tail of a TBD, only to find after I painted them, I masked lines on one side of the rudder opposite to the other side.  Got interrupted a few times during masking, then came back to it and rushed the paint session.  

Did something even crazier recently.   It was a late night, I was in a hurry to paint a canopy I just recently masked, and this canopy was quite a birdcage and took a few hours to mask.  Operating in half sleep mode, I took off the mask over the clear glass part and left the mask over the framing, then SHOT the dang canopy with topcoat and went to bed.   I did not discover my mistake until the next morning.  Talk about starting a Monday off all wrong.

Bish

I think my biggest Bone head mistake was taking up the damn hobby in the first place.

Beyond that, i'll have to think on it, just so many.

 

Amen Bish, and it seems the older I get, the more bonehead mistakes I tend to make, and not notice.

Hanging a Revell 1/32 F-4 Phantom from the ceiling next to a $100.00 GWH P-61 fully loaded w/PE Blackwidow.  The Phantom fell and took my very expensive GWH P-61 Blackwidow to the ground and literally exploded upon impact.  Pieces everywhere.  It looked like an aircraft crash landing site!  LOL!  

Toshi

Guys, So many of these made me laugh.  Its good we can laugh at ourselves and keep the hobby fun.  One of my most stupid mistakes was once I was trying to carve down some plastic to make something fit better.  I was using a newer exacto blade, but pulling the blade towards my thumb to get a bit more power and a deeper cut. (Any guesses where this is going?) Well, I did achieve a deeper cut, right in the meat of my thumb.  exacto blades are almost as good as scalpels.  It bled like a stuck pig for quite some time and hurt too.  Probably should of had stitches, but I toughed it out. 

Keep having fun my friends and may all our mistakes at least be memorable and recoverable.

John

Speaking about thumbs and xacto blades, when I was young my thumbs constantly received stitches. There for a while I didn't know if I would ever have a normal thumbprint.

My latest was trying to unscrew the lid of some MM aluminum enamel paint. I couldn't get it with my hand so I used channel locks for the lid. It still wouldn’t turn so I got another pair and used them on the lid and the other pair on the bottle. Still nothing so I tried harder. Then CRACK, the bottle broke and enamel aluminum went everywhere including my pants, shirt, chair, floor and building table. It's a good thing none splashed on my build at the time.

modelcrazy

Speaking about thumbs and xacto blades, when I was young my thumbs constantly received stitches. There for a while I didn't know if I would ever have a normal thumbprint.

 

My latest was trying to unscrew the lid of some MM aluminum enamel paint. I couldn't get it with my hand so I used channel locks for the lid. It still wouldn’t turn so I got another pair and used them on the lid and the other pair on the bottle. Still nothing so I tried harder. Then CRACK, the bottle broke and enamel aluminum went everywhere including my pants, shirt, chair, floor and building table. It's a good thing none splashed on my build at the time.

 

Great minds think alike, like as for me thinking that putting a MM bottle in the vise to hold while turning the lid with a pair of channel locks was a good idea.  Somehwere deep inside my brain, the order to the left hand to stop turing the vise handle was overidden by the order to keep turing in unison with the right hand that was operating the channel lock.

Tried to open a jar of paint with pliers, guess i don't know my own strength cause the jar shattered. Good thing it was flat black, made it easier to see where the red ooze was coming from.

I have a pair of removeable rubber jaws for my vise.  Never broke a bottle yet!  I believe I got them from MicroMark, they are held on magnetically and handy for many uses.

I discovered after breaking a few stuck jars to turn the bottle upside down and using a pipette, putting the appropriate thinner on the lid and let it sit for a few minutes.Works every time!

I also do that now, much easier to clean up alittle thinner than the whole jar of paint. Lot less explaining to the missed too LOL.

I've been sitting here reading all these and laughing histerically. Then it dawned on me that I was laughing at myself because I've not only done all of the above but a lot of other things too. Just last week, while working on a 1/72 Me328 V2  I forgot to install the pit BEFORE sealing the fuselage, filling the seam, sanding and priming. After building for 70 years, you'd think I know better.

Jim  

I just remembered something. A while back I had an MRI of my head done to try to explain headaches. The Dr. said he didn't find anything beween my right ear and my left ear. Maybe that's the reason. That's my story and I'm sticking to it. 

goldhammer

I glued up the fuselage on an SBD, only to find when I put it back in the box at the end of the work session that the assembled cockpit was still in the box, not the fuselage......ended up using the fuselage as AB practice piece.

 

Bish - all I can add is an "AMEN"

 

DAYYYUMMM, ART! LOL!! WHAT were you thinking?

Too many to count or remember in the 45+ years that I've been building: Xacto injuries... paint/glue/thinner spills to ruin clothes, tabletops, and kit parts.... parts glued in the wrong place or backwards... lost parts... building out of sequence so that sub assemblies don't fit in place as a result... too much putty or glue causing meltdowns and sinkholes...every decal mishap imaginable... breaking off every possible fiddly bit on every type of kit during assembly where the directions were followed to a T.... yeah, it's been a rocky road to get here...