What's your biggest foul up?

I don't know what the worst thing I have done...but here what I have done.

Got the plane together and saw what looked like a bad seam where two parts came together. Well out came the filler and the sand paper and went to work, got that seam to disappear. Then I looked at the plans again and found that it wasn't a seam but an actual panel line. . Tried to rescribed the panel line but I ended up just making a miss of it. It looked okay but the mistake just ruined the project for me.

Joined the fuselage together and while looking over the directions noticed that I forgot one thing....no not the cockpit...but the tail wheel. The tail wheel was to be glued on one side before joining the fuselage. Tried to insert it anyway but seeing the locating hole turned out to be next to impossible. And of course the glue dried so well that pulling the fuselage apart would have destroyed the model. Didn't feel like cutting it open or making a wheels up model so back in the box it went for another try sometime in the future.

Before going to bed I test fitted the cockpit tub, and fuselage fit.. Every thing seemed to line up...went to bed with the cockpit where it was. Next morning glued the fuselage together, let glue dry and came back to move on to the next step. Picked up plane...hear something drop and rattle inside the closed fuselage. Looked at cockpit tub...its gone!! I forgot to glue the cockpit tub into the side wall, now the cockpit sat at the bottom of the fuselage and back from the cockpit opening. While trying to pull the cockpit tub forward and up the joystick snapped off, then the dashboard, so all that was left was the seat and the tub and of course the tub would not move into position, ended up giving up and putting model back in box.

Lastly working on a Me 410, something wasn't going right with something...I don't remember now what it was...got angry and threw the completed cockpit against the wall. Cockpit ends up in several pieces that I never did all of.

All of these happened years ago so I might be better now, but there actually might be more that are more recent but theses all that I seem to remember for now. 

OK, both my stories involve pets. When I was about 10 we had a toy poodle called penny - penny used to jump on tables to check out what there was to eat. One day when I was at school, I had left my Airfix Skyraider suspended by it's wings in the box whilst the undercarriage dried. Penny jumped on the table and knocked a full jar of thinners over the kit. When I got home, the Skyraider looked like a prop off Sesame Street where they say "can anyone see the letter U in this picture ? "

 This didn't happen to me, it happened to a Mate and he swears it's true. It involved their elderly cat called Candy. My mate was about 12 and building a prized kit - the Airfix "Eagle" from Space 1999. The kit was all laid out while he was working on it, Candy was stretched out nearby , and she had some sort of seizure or epileptic attack which caused her to pee into the air , and all over ............ the kit decals ! this was about 1980 and no such thing as after market decals, I don't know if he wrote off to eAirfix for replacements.....

My biggest screw up was when I was painting the large transparency at the rear of an Millenium Falcon kit - it wasn't mine I was doing it for the Mate who used to own Candy ( he likes Sci Fi kits as you can see ). The spray can was supposed to be electric blue, but I had accidentally picked up a tine of "Ocean gray" needless to say the effect was sort of spoiled.

That would havetobe a toss up between dropping my almost finished 1/35 Blackhawk the night before the big  contest and busting the windshield in half, or trying to speed dry the escape tower for the Merucry Capsule with a hair dryer the prior year (again, nigiht before the contest, same contest venue!!) and warping it helplessly into a mass of twisted plastic.

 I dont go to that contest anymore.

 David

steelrudi wrote:

Starting this crazy hobby in the first place.  I would say the worst foul up was, when I spilled some CA, and went to clean it up, and answer the phone at the same time.  You can guess the rest.  Took 1/2 and hour for my wife to get the phone out of my hand in between the giggles, and out right laughing, and my cussing about it.  I don't answer the phone while building anymore.  I have a three year old for that when the nine year old doesn't want to.

Just out of curiosity, steelrudi, was it a telemarketer on the other end?

I've got two of them...

1)  I realized that I had used the wrong color on a camo scheme, so I used some paint remover on the body of the vehicle.  I must have used to much, because it also melted a large portion of the plastic that the paint was sitting on.  Ended up calling Tamiya for a replacement part.

2) I decided to bore out the barrel on Walker Bulldog resin update.  Drill speed was too high and I melted right through everything in about two seconds.  Goodbye, $32.

CA glue on the hands...yep, did that.  Frosted the model by spraying a flat coat without adding gloss...done that too.  Dropped the model breaking it into little bitty pieces....guilty as charged.  The one that really frosted my hide was this: 

I had spent days, I mean DAYS (spread out over several weeks) assembling AFV's T83E1 tracks for an M47 Patton.  These things took forever to clean up, are fragile as heck and they were already pushing my patience to the limit.  Finally got them assembled, painted and on the vehicle when I decided to apply an oil wash to further enhance them.  I KNEW that the paint thinner might be too hot for the tiny, fragile pins holding all the links together, but like a complete moron I did it anyway. Within hours pins start to dissolve and the tracks start falling apart.  Every time I tried to fix one, another would break.   The boiling point had been reached and I very nearly commited hara-kiri as the model itself was practically done...all I had to do was finish the tracks and then add some dust.  Fortunately the breaking stopped (??) and I managed to repair enough links to keep the tracks together, but a few links are still broken:

I should try to fix this as I don't know what's holding them together, but I'm afraid if I do they'll turn to dust!!

Its not actually going to be that bad (in the end) but i reckon the fuselage is 30% tamiya putty

Tell you the truth, i might not have bothered if it wasn't for the fact the resin cockpit tub can be pretty tricky to find

I just logged in to start a "Biggest foul up" thread and saw this, i needed to vent because of what just happened to my RAAF Mirage IIIO.

 Got up this morning, waddled up to my work bench, only to find that during the night, the worklamp that is on an arm so you can move it around had come loose and crashed down on top of the cockpit of my mirage, shattering the fragile resin wheel bay and cockpit i installed yesterday into 4 or 5 pieces. So i pry the nose apart to try and retrieve them and accidently snap that left fuselage off just forward the intake spike. I manage to retrieve the resin bits that are busted and get them back together  (luckily they were nice clean breaks), re-install the front wheel bay and then discover that the cockpit tub has now warped, which i think is due to heat from the lamp being so close to it all night, drying it out. So i have un-installed the wheel bay, moved it back 3 or so mm to get the cockpit tub on top of it and now have an aweful jagged break on the fuselage to fill, which is also going to mean i will have to sand off the raised panel lines on the forward fuselage to repair the damage and fill the hole left by moving the wheel bay.... so now i have a major panel line re-scribing job (the italeri kit has raised detail, and i will probably have to do the whole aircraft) to boot, as well as a difficult compound curve to fill and sand to get the profil back and having to make replacement gun ports as one of them has gone missing during the whole fiasco

Not happy....

My biggest foul up was that I actually believed the Aires F-8 Crusaser cockpit interior set for the Hasegawa kit actuallly fit the Hasegawa kit, not knowing that the Hasegawa kit they meant was the old tooling picked up by Revell.  Turns out the old tooling had a wider fuselage.

So I started grinding away the interior of the new Hase fuselage and the Aires cockpit tub until I realized I could never remove enough material for it to fit before grinding all the way thorough the fuselage or into the cockpit detail.  So now I have a complete, expensive F-8E Crusader kit--minus the fuselage halves--in the spare parts bin, and a fuselage tub too narrow to fit in the Revell F-8E.

This was the model about 30 minutes ago.

 After a brief trip from the table to the floor, please now remove the tailplane, re-locate some of the interior details to other parts of the cabin, and also subtract the front canopy which, by the way, now has shattered and has multipe cracks in the glass.

 Bugger.

The only two saving graces are that it was going to get another coat of paint anyway after a bit of sanding, and I have another canopy.

NTM

Similar to  Hkshooter's response, I was going to say "Saying those dreaded words 'I do' 18 years ago." Stupid, stupid, stupid!

But since this is about modeling mistakes, my biggest screw-up was the last project I finished (P-51B) where my first attempt at power buffing went horribly awry (buffing wheel was too stiff), and I had to sand and re-paint before getting it right with a softer wheel. No biggie. Not like lacquer thinner in the eye, or anything.

Had a 1:24 Bf109E with an engine cowling that wouldnt quite fit:

"i'll just put it in some hot water" sez I, that will make it nice and supple.

Ever seen a woollen pullover that has been boiled ?  SHRINK SHRINK SHRINK

needless to say, that model doesnt have an engine cowling anymore ......

Probably cutting out the flaps and ailerons on my Spruce Goose project.  I thought I could improve the kit in this respect, and while it probably WILL be an improvment, I now know it is NOT worth the effort.

Alas, I still have the one wing to finish, and the other wing to start......

not letting the future cure before a filter wash...created a huge mesh, so I stripped the paint and started over.

Wouldn't have been so bad, except I did the exact same thing again on the same kit!

Well there was that time I had the fuselage all glued up and realized that I had forgotten to install some minor parts… the cockpit.

Then there was that time I had the fuselage all glued up and realized that I had forgotten to install some minor parts… the cockpit. (No that is not a horrible cut and paste error… I did it twice)

Most recently (2 days ago) I couldn’t figure why the cockpit … yes I finally remember to put one in…. didn’t fit.  The IP hit parts of the cockpit sidewall.  I was ready, knife and saw in hand about to hack away some of the components when I figured out … left fuselage/left cockpit wall & right fuselage/right cockpit wall? Ah so THAT'S the way it's supposed to be...

And why is it that the glue has really set when you finally figure it out?  Oh sorry…. That’s for the “Murphy’s Law” thread…

Biggest ooppsy, or biggest I'm going to admit to here

Trying a new technique on a contest (I thought it was) almost finished kit. (I enter everything to contests - rarly get 'pat on back' award at best) So with a screwy paint job, no way to easily strip it without re detailing the interior parts (something always get's stripped of paint in there) it's relegated to the shelf of shame for now.

Did I learn my lesson - not likely

RemcoGrob wrote:

Colin wrote: I once decided to try to cut out the parts from my F4U-ID CORSAIR using a Minicraft drill with a cutting disc attached. BIG MISTAKE... The disc slipped and cut a groove through both the wings,this caused many hours of filling and sanding. I can laugh now but the air was turned blue at the time. So what's your biggest foul up? I once tried to dril the hole for the prop with a dremel, I slipped and made a nasty schratch on a already painted p-38. But my biggest foul up was using Tamiya Flat Base. I sprayed it on and my whole model became frosted... I later found out that you have to mix it with gloss coat. But the guy at the LHS didn't tell me that when I asked him "Wil this dry clear?"

I know a guy who did the exact same thing based on the same bad advice from the LHS.

My biggest? I was going to say getting married until I saw you were talking about the hobby. I frosted a Sherman with Future and flat base once. I guess the biggest was putting the main gear on my 262 on backwards. I'm not going to break them off to fix it.