Your Most Careless Mistake? Let's confess...

Mine are ALWAYS related to my impatience...

The most recent one included installing a canopy with glue and painting the 'edge'. Since this was just about the last step, I was very eager to polish everything up and put it on display. Unfortunately, I started wiping the canopy before the glue and paint were completely dry. Created a nice mess on both the canopy and the fuselage...

I resisted the urge to test out the model's durability vs. the concrete wall in my basement.

M.

Paccardi reminded me of my most recent big blunder. About 2 years ago I built an 1/48th Airfix Spitfire 5. A day after assembling the wing to the fuselage, I realized I had forgotten the rudder pedal/control stick sub assembly !

Another big one also involved a Spitfire. I took a finished Hasegawa 1/32nd Spitfire 5 to a local hobby shop to be put on display. One of the fellows who worked there pointed out a big finger print in the paint on the engine cowl - right where it was easily noticed ! I took it home, sanded and repainted. The original paint job was weathered, so the repaint just looked like part of the weathering process.

Jim

Just remembered a big one by a buddy of mine when we were about 10 or 11 years old. Remember the Aurora 1/48th P-51H ? Had retractable landing gear, so the gear struts had to be placed in the lower wing halves before the upper halves were glued on. He glued the wings together without the gear struts being there. I never let him forget it, and when I built that kit I made damn sure I remembered the gear !

I remember that while that kit was of the P-51H, the really nice illustration on the box was of a P-51D.

Jim

I always make some kind of mistake due to impatience...but one of my biggest was not impatience, but overthinking. I had thought about doing one step so much that I forgot to do it...or rather, I thought that I had already done it. After completing the next step I then realized that I had not completed the step that should have already been completed...DOH!

Jerry

My big mistake was not stopping when I should have. I was working on an F-15
VERY late the night before my first Buffcon show and thought "hey, a little bit of airbrushed weathering on this would make it look great!" Well I was spraying away and to my shock, and I do mean jaw dropped, holy begeebers shock, the color cup fell off my airbrush and all over the wing. I ended up wiping the paint off as best I could, repainting the wing and then going over the decals with thinner to get them to show again. Since this day there is still a big glob off paint on the bottom of the wing that formed as the paint ran from the top to the bottom and pooled. I now use a gravity fed airbrush or make sure the cup is on REALLY tight.

Whaz up,
Does anybody have a Snickers???
I really cant remember what a/c it was but it was one of my first builds that my dad wasn't around to guide me.
I had come back to the bench after gluing my fuselage together and noticed a cockpit sitting off to the side. I thought when did dad start another kit??
Well lo and behold it was my cockpit which I had forgotten to glue in before I glued the halfs together. Can you say DUH..!!!!!
Flaps up, mike

not sure if this takes the cake as MOST careless (man do I have to do some pondering on THAT one) but it IS my most recent.

I'm working on a 1/48 F-15I, using the Revel F-15E and Cutting Edge conversion set. I had some reference photos of the outside of F-15Is to show the paint scheme, different parts, etc, but none of the cockpit. No worries, I figured, as it's ESSENTIALLY an F-15E so I worked off F-15E photos and painted accordingly, with black panels on gray consoles with gray sidewalls (typical US cockpit arrangement). Happy as a clam I cement the nose halves together and dress the seams.

A week leader I get my new copy of Air Forces Monthly, with an article about the F-15I. Turns out the Israelis paint EVERYTHING in the cockpit black so there's no gray surfaces to reflect light and interfere with NVDs (with 100 NVD hours in the EA-6 I wasn't quite aware of this problem). After some heavy thought, I decided the damage resulting from cracking open the canopy and repainting the cockpit wouldn't quite be worth it, as the only people who would likely notice the blunder would be the ones to whom I pointed it out....

Lesson is, just when you think you're done with research, you're not....

I once painted a p 51 purple.

ROFL!!! i always seem to screw up when it comes to putting it on the shelf

I was painting a Boeing Sentry which I didn't liked so I stripped the paint off the plane and radardish. So far so good after cleaning everything I repainted the plane it looked realy nice. I wanted to see who the radardish looked on the plane.
Left it there for a day or so. Came back and saw that the paint had gone from the rear part of the plane. Reason the radardish was filled with braking fluid, the fluid leaked onto the plane and stripped the paint right off the body. It took me several hours to clean the plane and radardish.

I don't know which is my MOST careless one. So of them caused by ignorance or even stupidity. May be you folks can choose one for me:

1) I once built the Revell 1/32 Spritfire Mk I. I glued the left flap to the right wing and right flap to the left wing.

2) Similar to Case 1, I once glued the left propeller to the right engine in my Airfix P-38 and vice versa.

3) Trying to make my old Airfix 1/72 TBF Avenger looked remarkable, I once painted 12 tiny Japanese flags on it as kill marks.

4) After seeing the USAF insigna in the 70's, I thought the decal in my Monogram 1/48 P-47 Thunderbolt was wrong. So I add a red stripe on the white area on the insigna and painted the word 'USAF' on the wing.

5) While painting a F-4 Phantom with brush, the phone rang. I rushed to the phone but left the brush on the wing!! When I returned, the paint dried. I pulled the brush hard, leaving hair on the brush got sticken on the wing.

Well, when you were 14 years old, you did a lot of crazy things.

I had already built 2 Revell 1/48 A-10's, not realizing how much the tail section weighed. Well I went and got another one, spent about 6 mos. building, detailing, smoothing, painting, and arming it to the teeth!. Before I knew it thpthptptph!!!!! Nose in the air!! I had to cut just behind the front nose gear and attach lead weight in and patch up the bottom. Not the most professional thing to do to a model!

I don´t remember what model I was made, but I glued the halves of fuselage before glued the cub of propeller...the propeler never twirl

Reading that one with the Sentry and radar dish full of break fluid reminded me of something my dad told me once. When he was still flying private jets (HS-125's with the old venom(?) engines) he flew out of Luton airport near London. At the end of the runway is the Vauxhall car factory with its car park. On one day this old 707 freighter took off, raised its gear, burst the hydraulic system and sprayed a few hundred freshly painted, brand new, still ownerless cars with one of the most aggressive substances short of acid: aviation hydraulic fluid. Every single car in the lot had to be resprayed..

OUCH!

Well, the one that sticks in my memory regards my 1/72 CP-140 Aurora patrol aircraft (built from Hasegawa's 1/72 P-3C Orion).

I knew from the begining this thing was going to need a significant amount of nose weight to keep her on her nose gear. I ran back and forth through the house looking for something that would weigh it down well enough.

After three days of experimenting with various weighty objects with various degrees of a lack of success, I cast my eyes over to a broken stereo speaker that was going in the garbage. I pried the magnet of the back of the speaker cone and glued it to the back of the cockpit bulkhead and stuck the fuselage together.

After a few months on the shelf, I noticed the distance between the wheels, both nose and main were widening at the bottoms and narrowing at the tops.

Still have that model and the magnet's still in it. One day I'll pull it all down and redo it.

Screwing up is like any other job, if you're going to do it, do it right!

A long time ago in a galaxy far away.........
I was working the 3rd shift at a print shop while in college. At the time I was working on an A-10 and was not happy with the paint job on the flaps. I had access to acetone at work so I decided to help myself to a sprite bottle full. Needless to say styrene plastic does not fair to well with acetone. Not only did the paint come off but the flaps curled up like those fries you get at Arbys. That mistake made become very familiar with the chemicals you can use with plastic.

Dumb A** !!!!!

From the rest of the posts I'm glad to see I'm not the only person out there who acts before they think.

I was building a P-61 totally black with invasion stripes, the paint job was superb, a nice black and shiny color, when I started to airbrush the invasion stripes I had forgoten to put the plug on the other side of the airbrush.... I felt this warm fuzzy feeling running across my fingers when I looked there was white paint all over the plane.... even in the inside!!!!!

Mine was that whilst spraying a model of the Red Barron Starfighter (esci 1/72) I didnt take into consideration the close proximity of the jaws 2 A10 that i had recently finished....nice red spots dont make good camo. my mate Andy (who wont admit to this) had just completed a matchbox lysander when i called at his house. He told me he had loads of trouble getting the wings to fit i had a look and told him that i was not suprised as he had got them left to right and back to front. nice one Andy easy mistake to make HA HA HA cheers Gregers

Build a Hasegawa P-12E once and put just a wee bit too much tension on the rigging-I was using nylon fishing line- and a few days later noticed that I had a nearly perfect "V" on the lower wing assembly. That was a pin in the you know what to correct! - Ed

Well not my mistake but one that was told to me at the recent Tamiyacon here in New Zealand. A well known Kiwi modeler was working on a kit when he accidently tipped a bottle of MEK into the box containing all the parts, so quick as a flash he jumped up to remove the sprues out of the box, only to knock it all onto the carpet. I was told it was impossible to remove all the carpet fluff off the sticky plastic.

My worst one involved using tamiya enamel OD to paint an M3 halftrack (brush painting, hadn't got an airbrush then), after leaving the paint for what I thought would be long enough - about 3 days, I applied the good old oil paint and turps wash, only to have all the paint disolve...

Just been reminded (By the missus)I had just finished reading an article on safety whilst model making in SMI, then started kit bashing paring away at some plastic i remembered the bit about cutting AWAY from your body. changed the way i was holding the part.....OUCH....still have the 3/4 inch scar on my finger. Back to red spots on the latest creation.painfull experiences whilst kitbashing would make a good (and funny)thread dont you think?...Gregers

Well, there was the time the xacto knife rolled off the workbench and fell, point down into my thigh... with a brand new blade.....

My most frustrating was building the 1/48 Hasegawa F-86F. I wanted this kit so badly. I saved every last penny because I was going to build it right... wheel sets, flaps sets, cockpit, great decals, etc.... So, I get the cockpit built flawlessly, the fuselage goes together without a hitch. Wings on nicely... then came painting....

I sprayed it Testors aluminum metalizer, which, in itself was not a problem. But for some reason I had to touch it to see if it was dry instead of LEAVING IT ALONE. SQUISH.... nice thumbprint right on the spine. So, do I leave it and wait to deal with it another day? NO. I get out the thinner and wipe the offending spot down immediately. Dumb move #2. Thinner got everywhere. So, I ended up having to strip all of it. Ok, no biggie, I'll just spray it again tomorrow. The next paint job went pretty well.... until I sprayed it with metalizer sealant. For some reason it reacted with the paint (probably because I was impatient and it hadn't fully dried yet!) Needless to say, this particular F-86 was a high-speed testbed airframe to study impacts on vertical surfaces... MAN was I pissed....

I've since built several of them quite successfully. Just couldn't get that first one right!

Cobrahistorian's story reminds me of the greatest lessons I've got from model building. I now almost have a 6th sense of when any further effort is going to make a mess. Yep, I've finally learned the art of when to call it a day and walk away before I make it worse! No one is more suprised than me....

I was about ten and I had read that you could place a freshly painted model in a "drying oven" to speed up the cure time. I figured the gas oven pilot light would work, so I placed my beautiful, detailed, expensive Tamiya Sherman Tank in the oven on an old pie plate. Forgot to tell my mom. She turned up the heat to cook dinner without looking, and my Sherman tank looked like Atlanta after Sherman left!

I spent weeks carefully superdetailing the cockpit of the Bandai Moonbase Interceptor. I then replaced the 'bubble' canopy with a piece of 5 thou plasticard. then sprayed the whole model with Enamel thinners to degrease it. the beautifully clear canopy promptly disintegrated.
Today, I was cutting out the bottom vacformed saucer shell for the SHED Models UFO (long since discontinued). I managed to seperate the shell from the sheet. then, rather than laboriously snad it down, I decided to put it in a motor tool and apply a razor blade...
the darned thing shattered!

My most careless? Hmmmm? How about something on every one! I allways manage a good dumb blunder of some sort.

Last week I was putting the last touches an Has 1\48 type52 zero and noticed a pair of gun barrels on the sprue. WHAT THE H#$# ARE THOSE!!!! Sure enough they had to be installed prior to the addition of the cowl and engine. AWE S*#@!

Oh well. lets see what I can screw up on fugimi's 1\48 Bf 109 G-6. I'm sure it won't be long.

OK, I'll bite.
I don't usually make careless mistakes, because I stopped rushing models about thirty years ago! Stupid mistakes are something else entirely. Mostly, braking one part off, while trying to attach another part, ie "Didn't that F-16 have a Pitot tube, yesterday?"

My 1/72 Revell F/A-18E, (nice kit by the way) does have a nose gear floor glued in backwords, because, well I really don't know why it's in backwords, I know I put it in correctly when I glued the body halves together, d'oh!!! Anyway drilling a new hole for the gear, solved the problem, right???? Well, it did, if you don't look to closely.

Archer out.

Never Airbrush a model with oil based paint before all the little water drops that collect in the corners ( from washing the model) are gone. Oil and water don't mix!!

Ah yes, that first attempt at using CA instead of the old stand by tube glue! The first few parts went together well, until the wings. While holding the wing, seam side up, I frogot to take in the fact that CA is ALOT thinner than tube glue. I didn't see the rivulette until I attempted to remove pressure from the wing(finger pressure) and notice two fingers were not only stuck to the wing, but stuck together! I knew by then that acetone would eat plactic so I painfully peeled ny fingers off and left 2 finger pads worth of skin attached. Needles to say that model got chucked!