A MODELMAKER’S LIFE: ONE OF THOSE DAYS…

24th September 2025

With tomorrow being my granddaughter’s birthday, I’ve spent much of today building one of her presents, a piece of furniture that took over three hours to complete. Much of that was down to the complexity of the piece, but some of it was definitely down to the frankly shocking drawings that accompanied the parts, which were both too small and misleading in places. So you can imagine my pleasure when it was finally assembled…

Along with the birthday gift, I’ve managed to do a little modelling as well, my main focus being the application of decals. My favourite part of any build, today’s shenanigans started off with a marking that I thought was too big, only to discover I’d applied in the wrong position, the marking needing to go under a panel, rather than over it. Much hilarity ensured.

If that wasn’t bad enough, I then completed the decals, only to discover that I had misread the instructions and placed two decals along adjacent panel lines in the drawings that seemed to match the model but didn’t. It was only when I tried to fit the tailplanes and found that they overlapped the markings, that my mistake became apparent. Normally, I would have simply removed the decals and replaced them with spares, but in this case had none, so had to very carefully lift them with a soft brush and the tip of a scalpel blade so that they could be repositioned. Of course this was made doubly hard thanks to the fact that the markings had been set in place with setting solutions, so were incredibly reticent to play ball, almost 30 minutes of soaking and painstaking work being used up to reposition two very small decals, that if I’d concentrated more, would have been in the correct place from the get-go. Like I say: it’s been one of those days…

See you tomorrow.