Foolish Modeling "disasters"

Just yesterday I spilled nail polish remover with acetone all over my nearly completed F-18. I ruined about half of the paint, and it debonded one of the rudders and a landing gear door completely. Crap. At least I wasn't totally finished with it. Maybe it's salvageable, I sure hope so. It was coming together nicely.

madda

QUOTE: Originally posted by Kugai I don't have many "disasters," but I have a lot of projects that are "incomplete and awaiting further refinement of my skills as a modeler." OK, enough plausible deniability ( or should that be "denial"? )... The biggest goof-up I can think of ( one from which there was no recovery ) was the time I left a completed B-2 in the car during a move. I was tired after a long drive and decided I'd unpack the car the next day ( I'd arrived at about 11 pm ). though the outside temperature was only about 60 fegrees, greenhouse effect in the car saw to it that my B-2 looked like an attempt at a "folding wing" variant on one side and ... Hmm, how can I best describe the rest? Ask a 4-year-old kid to make a B-2 from silly putty or plastecine. Now imagine that far-from-aerodynamic, uneven surface in 1:72 scale with accurate colors and markings with about a 45-degree downangle on the right wing. All other incidents resembling "disasters" are pretty much covered in my contribution to the "10 things I've learned" thread. Now, as for dealing with other people's mistakes, only 2 come to mind. One occurred when I was helping a newcomer to the hobby and time came for them to paint their project. The lessons on "black caps for enamels, gray caps for acrylics" and "how to clean enamel and acrylic paint off the brushes" were apparently not as clear as I thought. The worst part was that the brushes and paints were mine! The other ( asking for advice here ) has to do with a recent trade I made. I am now the proud owner of a partially completed first-edition Enterprise kit ( original series ). The catch is, I now know why the previous 2 owners gave up on it. It turns out the first guy used the old 2-part epoxy glue from the '70s to try to put the thing together. This stuff is about 5 times harder than the plastic in the kit, so any attemts to remove it will at best wear out my sanding materials and X-actos at an unbelievable rate, and at worst ruin the kit. Anyone out there have a better way to remove the stuff? If not, maybe I'll just trade it to someone else who underestimates the epoxy. maybe it'll become a modelers' legend. The eternally-traded, never completed kit that passes from owner to owner... "Til next time I couldn't even find my way back to "normal" with the Hubble!

Gee, that would make it the model builder's answer to the theory that there is only one fruitcake in the whole world and that it just gets passed from owner to owner every Christmas.

In the 70s I got real heavy {this is not a pun} into 1/32 scale aircraft. The Revell P-38 was a real tail dragger but, the nose and engine compartments had lots of space for lead weight. when finished this thing looked great and weighed a ton. It did however sit on all three. So one 74 winter afternoon I was pondering my growing collection and decreasing elbow room. Mom came to the rescue!!! She suggested reverse my display technique. What a dummy, how obvious. Hang the large ones, and put the smaller ones on the shelves. Great idea! When I got around to the P-38 I hung it the same way I had the others. About an hour later I'm in the living room when comes a loud crash from my bedroom. I still have some of the parts in my parts box.

Nothing like getting ready for a show and putting undiluted flat finish on it.. which turns white.

Once I painted a greenhouse canopy the color of the frames, in hopes that I might simply scrape the paint off the glass portions....

2 pieces of sandpaper, one fresh hobby blade and a canopy with 6 nice, big scratch marks on it later.....

..... I learned to buy Eduard's masks.

(I eventually bought a Squadron vac-form canopy replacement for the plane)

The stories that we can all tell, Mine is spent hours building the "Bismark" motoried kit converted to Wire control. Was testing in the bay when the tide went out and my cable broke and i watch the bismark sail away. Another one i am a C-130 nut was transferred to a new duty station, i packed all my models myself and i had (note the word had) a hugh box of C-130's about 15 of them, the moving company said them were not to blame. So somewhere there are 15 very detailed hand painted beauties that someone needed more then i did.

The wings on my second model fit forwards and backwards, so I put the wings on backwards. Later I removed the wings and put them on backwards again! I got it right on the third try.

FUTURE MODELING MISTAKE: I'm going to imbed a 1/72 dh.2 in a block of resin. - Disaster waiting to happen!

I dropped an exacto knife with a double edged blade inserted. Tried to catch in instinctively before it hit the floor. You can guess the rest. 7 stitches later, to both thumb and forefinger, I threw the double edge blade out. Couldn't build anything for a week.

Not too long ago I was using my OLD Aztek airbrush when I didn't have the lid on all the way and the paint spattered all over my hobby table and the wall. Well I had to clean up the mess and repaint the wall. Thank goodness the wife didn't find out.

Stayed up a little to late trying to finish a Revell Helldiver in time for a competition the next day and applied liquid glue to the decals insted of solvent. I didn't win.

I don't have many "disasters," but I have a lot of projects that are "incomplete and awaiting further refinement of my skills as a modeler."

OK, enough plausible deniability ( or should that be "denial"? )...

The biggest goof-up I can think of ( one from which there was no recovery ) was the time I left a completed B-2 in the car during a move. I was tired after a long drive and decided I'd unpack the car the next day ( I'd arrived at about 11 pm ). though the outside temperature was only about 60 fegrees, greenhouse effect in the car saw to it that my B-2 looked like an attempt at a "folding wing" variant on one side and ...
Hmm, how can I best describe the rest? Ask a 4-year-old kid to make a B-2 from silly putty or plastecine. Now imagine that far-from-aerodynamic, uneven surface in 1:72 scale with accurate colors and markings with about a 45-degree downangle on the right wing.

All other incidents resembling "disasters" are pretty much covered in my contribution to the "10 things I've learned" thread.

Now, as for dealing with other people's mistakes, only 2 come to mind. One occurred when I was helping a newcomer to the hobby and time came for them to paint their project. The lessons on "black caps for enamels, gray caps for acrylics" and "how to clean enamel and acrylic paint off the brushes" were apparently not as clear as I thought. The worst part was that the brushes and paints were mine!

The other ( asking for advice here ) has to do with a recent trade I made. I am now the proud owner of a partially completed first-edition Enterprise kit ( original series ). The catch is, I now know why the previous 2 owners gave up on it. It turns out the first guy used the old 2-part epoxy glue from the '70s to try to put the thing together. This stuff is about 5 times harder than the plastic in the kit, so any attemts to remove it will at best wear out my sanding materials and X-actos at an unbelievable rate, and at worst ruin the kit. Anyone out there have a better way to remove the stuff?

If not, maybe I'll just trade it to someone else who underestimates the epoxy. maybe it'll become a modelers' legend. The eternally-traded, never completed kit that passes from owner to owner...

"Til next time


I couldn't even find my way back to "normal" with the Hubble!

Never clean out your airbrush and bottles next to the kit that you just finished painting.

It was not a total loss but set my project back about a month and it did not turn out as well as I planned it to.

I guess all the other disasters are the falures.
The kits that never got finished.

Before I had my compressor and air-brush, I had this 1/72 F-16A kit which I painted in a U.S. grey camo scheme by hand. It already looked nice but when the air-brush came, I itched to repaint it.

First step of course was to strip it clean. The paint I originally used was acrylic so I tried acrylic thinner in stripping but it was painfully slow. So, I decided to use lacquer thinner instead to cut time. I already knew that it could eat into plastic so I applied only little amounts on a piece of cloth and did the stripping carefully. The only problem is that the color of the base paint and the original plastic color is almost identical (grey) so I was not able to notice that I was already stripping into the plastic.

The result: An F-16 with a very smooth skin without those panel lines and inscribed details (its final flight was to the garbage bin).

And of course, I still have extra two AIM-9, two GBU-12? and a drop tank in my spares box to remind me.

Actually one of the resons why I call myself...a beginner.

I was about 14 when I thought of motorizing the main rotors of a 1/32 Revell Miss Clawd Cayuse helo. I crammed in a motor I took from a ship model, stuck out long wires for batteries through the exhaust, and built and finished the kit. It was only then that I was able to test the motor with the rotors attached.

The motor was apparently not aligned well, and at first go the helo vibated quite badly, creating cracks on the fuselage of my newest model. I didnt know any better and my teenage hormones told me to add more batteries to the power source to smoothen the spin.

The helo promptly rattled and rolled straight to the edge of my workbench and into the wall, popping off the windscreen, slamming the tail, and reducing the main rotor and rotor hub into several unrecognizable pieces.

tonight I went to shake a can of Humbrol paint (if you recall the lid is the color of the paint) The lid was off??!!?? I managed to salvage both the ref. book and the instructions with only slight stains![xxP]

Always be sure to close up and remove any flamable mixtures from the area in which you are stretching sprue with a candle flame.......
Picture if you will, the scene of the monkeys on the stove in the movie Jumanji and you will have a close picture of me that day.

Mike

It was the first time I used Testor's Dullcoat, I didn't know or even wonder before what it would do to my clear parts!! Haven't made that mistake since. Although, if you ever want to make a window look cloudy or misty, that will do just fine.

My most recent, and probably biggest modeling disaster so far was when I was painting the gas mask canisters for my SS soldiers. I had just touched up the details on two of them, and had put them at the end of my paining bench. Suddenly, disaster struck. I ended up (dont ask me how) knocking the bottle of paint all over my newly touched up SS soldiers and all over my pants. This ended up ruining my SS soldier (only one thank god) and a perfectly good pair of pants!

While building AMT's XB-70 I finally reached the point where it was time to glue the air intake/engine compartment section to the delta wings. The procedure was a success, until I took off the clamps and realized that I had glued the wings to the compartment upside down. A total loss.

I then purchased another model and this time I glued it perfectly. During the paint process I primed with gray primer then fillled gaps then primed some more then filled more gaps, followed by several coats of white paint .. by then so much paint had gone on the model that I again lost the surface detail. Not to worry, I said -- I'll just rescribe panel lines. Well the paint was so thick it flaked and cracked. So I decided to remove it all ... but again I lost patience with the paint remover and decided to use a "soft" wire brush so speed things up. Another total loss.

Back to the hobby store to buy a third model. This one is currently at the first coat of paint stage and looks wonderful so far. While it was an expensive lesson, I learned a lot about test fitting, gap-filling, and above all -- patience.

i once tried to "recast" an engine with a putty with solvent. never did that again.

Not really a disaster but a "learning experience" ...

When I was about 13 (after months of whining and pleading), my folks got me an airbrush for Christmas. The first thing I wanted to paint with it was the interior tub for an AMT modified stocker. I mixed the silver paint 1:1 with thinner, attached a full can of propellant and adjusted the air valve and needle wide open. (wanted good coverage, you know?) When I hit the trigger, a truly amazing amount of paint went into the center of the tub and immediately blew right back out into my face. Thanks to the memory of that huge silver fog, I never forget to check my settings.

Reading djmodels1999 post reminds me of the time that I too needed a little ballast for the nose of an A4f Skyhawk....".Why a little squeeze of this Squadron Green Putty otta do the trick."

Building a 1/72 Vac-U-Formed airplane. I was wet sanding the stabilizers and after about 5 minutes of sanding, I realized I sanded the skin off my fingertips as well. I had to wear band-aids on my fingers for a few days, cause everything I touched hurt. Even washing my hands was painful.

upnorth,

For the most part I agree with you. The only problem is, if I screw up to big at work, then the airplanes make those noisy landings. Those pesky pilots are so picky.

Darren

Well, screwing up is like anything else, if you're going to do it. do it right! ;-)

I once painted a star upside down on the wing of a real airplane!!! .It was a stearman. I was using a stencil on the bottom of the wing. Boy did I catch a lot of flak from that one. So paint mistakes are not limited to models only.

Darren

I've made a few screw ups myself.

I overdid the nose weight in a 1/72 CP-140 Aurora and the landing gear are really starting to show it. I'm still deliberating on the best fix to that one.

My first model contained my first screw up, it was Monogram's Snap Tite 1/72 F-4 Phantom II. Excited 7 year old that I was, I put one of the wing insignias on backwards, so the top of the star was pointing to the trailing edge of the wing.

Not long after that, I stuck the radome on Revell's old 1/48 F-16 on upside down. I fixed that, though in hindsight it was interesting to see it have a General Dynamics family resemblance to the F-111 as it had a bit of a turned up snout.

There's probably several more of my screw ups that aren't in my mind at the moment, I'll add more when I remember them.

In the meantime, have any of you ever dealt with someone else's screw ups? Several years ago, I came into the possesion of a big box of finished models. Some of them were damaged beyond repair, but some could be salvaged.

One that could be saved was Monogram's 1/48 B-25 Mitchell. I started pulling it apart to correct a few things that its first builder had done wrong. I was pulling lumps and lumps of plasticine nose balast out and something small fell out and hit the floor. It didn't sound like plastic or metal, on closer inspection, I found it was a little glass tube filled with mercury. Can you believe someone would be that much of a bonehead to use mercury as nose balast?! How long have we known it wasn't good for our health and needed special procedures to handle it safely? Longer than plastic model kits have existed, thats for sure.

Luckily, it didn't break open and spill all over the place. I quickly ditched the Mitchell in a garbage bag, not wanting to know what else might be lurking in it that had no place in a model.

We've all screwed up on a model at least once, sometimes worse than others, but I can't think of one screw up that I've done, or seen any one else do that tops that mercury nose weight.

Oh yeah. Just remembered another one. Found a "acrylic laquer" paint that had the exact color of green I needed for a mello yellow race car I was building. Applied it on top of the gloss black enamel paint and sat there and watched it all just slide right off the sides of the body.

Although, I will admit, I've never seen a cleaner piece of plastic once it fell off.