I know this topic has been discussed ad nauseum but I think is the first time I’ve ever chimed in on the subject. I find myself in a modeling funk. But it’s not that I don’t feel like building anymore or that I’m not inspired. It just seems that I’ve been striking out more than I usually do. Here’s what I mean: I assembled the Revellogram 1/48 F-101B Voodoo a while ago. It takes me months to get one airframe put together because of family obligations. Anyway, I got it all painted with gloss white paint in preparation of buffing it with SnJ metal powder. When I applied the metal powder, it magnified the almost orange peel-like surface of the gloss white paint by a factor of about a thousand. It just didn’t look good from even five feet away so I began the process of stripping it all away. What an absolute mess! But it was slowly coming off. I don’t know if it was the constant pressure on the plastic from all my rubbing and scrubbing, if it was from the effects of all the thinner and Testor’s ELO that I used to strip the paint or a combination of both but the plastic ended up tearing like so much damp lasagna noodles. There was just no saving it so I just dumped the whole works. I was seriously bummed because I was going to give that model to my dad.
I next grabbed the Hasegawa P-51D out of my stash because I had some great aftermarket decals that I wanted to use (“Frenesi”). However, the Hasegawa kit had the tail fillet while Frenesi was an early –D variant without the fillet. I cut away the fillet and now I’ve got this gigantic jagged gap in the tail that I am incapable of fixing. I’m going to stash that model away until I can get a hold of the Ultracast filletless resin tail. Siiiigh…
So next I picked up what I thought was going to be a very simple model to build for a friend’s son to put in his airplane-themed room: Lindberg’s 1/32 Laird-Turner Meteor. It went together just fine but then I figured I’d try my hand at foiling. I got about 98% done with all the foiling and it just dawned on me: Who was I kidding? I just wasn’t happy with the way it turned out. Hard as I tried, I could not eliminate all the wrinkles and unsightly bumps that popped up here and there. I wasn’t going to give something like that to the kid. I wasn’t going to give a model that I wasn’t proud of to someone else so I stripped all the foil off. The glue left an amazingly sticky residue behind so I’ve been using nail polish remover to clean the surface. It’s been another mess so, while the model is now stripped, I’ve set it aside just to step away from it. Then came the next blunder.
I figured I needed some good mow-joe (my other spelling of the word got the **** treatment) so I picked up ICM’s P-51B in 1/48 scale. I heard it was a virtual copy of the Tamiya kit but maybe just not AS refined. The cockpit was nice enough and went smoothly. I got the two fuselage halves glued together and I figured “So far, so good”. But then I got to the wings. There are no locator pins. Okay. No biggie. I’ve put limited run and resin kits together with practically zero fuss so I figured this would not be too much of a challenge. It turns out it IS a challenge when the lower wing is warped. Even the gear well walls were horribly warped. On top of that, there was stress whitening on the plastic. It came out of the box that way so Lord only knows what happened to cause that. Trying to flex the bent walls back to their normal position resulted in even bigger whitening stress. I said “Screw it! I’ve seen people get good results with the ICM Mustang so I can do it, too.” I got one upper wing glued on with lots of plastic shaving, clamping and Tamiya thin cement. Once that set, I test fit the wings to the fuselage. When you look at the model from directly above, the angle of the wing root on the fuselage does NOT match the angle of the wing root on the upper wing. This was the straw that broke the camel’s back. In the next day or two, when I get the time, I’m just going to outright trash the entire kit.
I’m sorry for the droning on and on but this is my verbal “primal scream therapy”. I just had to get it out of my system. I want to keep building but I need a good kit. I’m hoping the Monogram AD-6 Skyraider will work out better. What bugs me a lot is that of the four planes I’ve buggered up, the two Mustangs and the Laird-Turner Meteor were all gifts from my mother-in-law that I got a couple of years ago.
Has anyone else had that many screw-ups one right after another or am I the only one? I look at my display shelves full of amazing builds that I'm so happy with and then I ponder how on earth could I screw up four planes in a row???
Eric