This is being written as a means of calming myself down after the stupidest accident I've had in 55 years of modeling.
The second stupidest happened in about 1972, when I felt something rolling off my workbench, snapped my legs together to catch whatever it was, and thereby embedded an Xacto knife up to its hilt in my right thigh. Tonight's stunt was dumber - and even more spectacular.
My wife is out of town and I'm batching it, so I sat down at the workbench about 11:00 to work a bit on my little Bluejacket resin lobster boat.
I needed to put a couple of tiny drops of CA adhesive on the ends of a rigging line. Unfortunately the regular screw-off cap on the nozzle of the bottle was stuck. So I casually unscrewed the whole nozzle, opening up the whole bottle. I dipped a wire in the glue, got the first of my little drops, and applied it to the model. My left elbow then hit the bottle and knocked it over on the workbench.
Suddenly I had a 4"-wide puddle of CA in front of me. Several Vallejo paint bottles, a pair of tweezers, and a couple of other tools were in the middle of it. I rescued the bottles and the tools, and then confronted the puddle itself. The closest thing to hand with which I could wipe it up was a package of baby wipes, which I keep on the bench to keep my hands clean.
Bad mistake. The wipes soaked up the CA all right, but they did it so fast that I was caught by surprise when a couple of wipes suddenly got glued to my fingers.
Like everybody else, I suspect, I've gotten drops of CA on my fingers plenty of times. But this was different. I was completely unprepared for the awful burning sensation. My fingertips were literally smoking. The smell was awful, too.
The pain was such that I instinctively grabbed another handful of wipes and started rubbing my fingers to try to cool them off. That made things worse. My right middle finger, in particular, hurt so much that I had to take a pair of pliers and literally peel away a mangled wipe, along with a couple of layers of skin, before the pain eased up.
At that point I made my way to the bathroom, ran cold water on my hands, and dug out a little tube of Pain Relief Neo-Sporin. That helped some. Now a couple of my fingers are wrapped up in bandaids. I hope they don't keep me awake all night. If the damage had been any worse I would have headed for the emergency room, where I'm sure I would have given the doctors and nurses a good laugh.
I have, of course, been thinking about what I did wrong and what I should have done different. I've read several times about little wood or plastic foam bases to hold bottles so it's physically impossible to knock them over. Such a gadget is on my agenda for tomorrow.
In retrospect, having done the initial stupid stunt, I probably should have rescued the tools and paint bottles and then shot the puddle with CA accelerator. That would have wrecked the big self-healing board cover on my bench top - but it's probably ruined anyway. (Well, I was about due for a new one anyhow.) And I guess I'll buy a bottle of de-bonder.
That's about the most positive thing I can think of to say about this little episode. No further progress on the lobster boat tonight. Sympathetic moaning sounds would be appreciated.