A MODELMAKER’S LIFE: SEEMS LIKE YOU CAN TEACH AN OLD DOG NEW TRICKS…

I guess I was simply taking the route of least resistance, rather than trying something though not exactly new, was less familiar.

5th September 2025

If today has taught me anything (apart from modelling needing immeasurable amounts of patience when things aren’t going entirely your way) is that sometimes, the old ways are not always the best ways. Sometimes you have to bite the bullet, change direction and do things a little differently.

That became evident today as I started to clean-up my latest build. I had a few sizeable panels to fill, so decided to use white Milliput, a material that is not only easy to use, but easy to sand to a glass-like finish. In place, my sanding had indeed been successful, so I was happy to rescribe around the now sealed-in work, something that was again, relatively straightforward. That was, until it wasn’t.

It was actually going pretty well, the scribed lines looking nice and sharp, a pin mounted in a pin-vice, all guided by one of those oh-so-useful etched scribing guides, making easy work of it. Having scribed three sides of a square panel, I decided that edge four would be scribed using the same tool, this time guided by some Dymo Tape, again, another tried and tested method.

Tape placed, I scribed the lines. Lines scribed, I removed the tape…along with a chunk of the Milliput. I then removed the other strip; same result. You can imagine my reaction.

I tried, I really did, to repair the holes with superglue, but the results were less-than-optimal and despite my best efforts I couldn’t create a finish that looked remotely acceptable, especially as the panels were in such an obvious position. Time for a rethink.

After a coffee and a sizeable handful of Bourbon biscuits I went for the nuclear option: grind out the offending material, and then replace everything with superglue mixed with talcum powder. This time though, rather than simply patching the holes, I ground away a sizeable area around each panel so that the rescribing was inside the patch, thus reducing any chance of crumbled edges to almost zero.

What followed was another round of sanding (Infini’s sanding sticks working wonders) polishing and then rescribing, this time with rather more successful results.

So here’s the rub. If I had done this in the first place instead of trying to be clean and tidy, I would have saved myself hours of work. But I guess I was simply taking the route of least resistance, rather than trying something though not exactly new, was less familiar. Were I to build this model again, I would absolutely travel the path I eventually found myself on. Indeed, were I to do something similar, I would do the same, so I’ll chalk that up as something of a win even if it didn’t exactly feel that way as the milling bit started to dig into work that only a few days ago, I was more than happy with…

See you tomorrow.