Last Thursday morning I set off back to Devon on a 350 mile drive from Cumbria. 10 miles into the journey, my car’s water pump died and I was stranded. My motoring recovery service failed in their contractural obligation to bring me home, such that my car has been languishing in a Carlise garage over Easter and is only now receiving attention … but that’s another story.
The scale modelling tale is one of me returning to where my hobby started, some 50 years ago, with what tools I could find around the house and a hairy stick to colour my creations!
Feeling the need to build, I begged a lift over to a local garden centre close to my temporary location where I knew they had a large stock of Airfix kits. Without any of my usual tools nor paints with me, I decided on a couple of AFV starter kits which I felt I could better get away with a rough and ready finish.
Using a set of snips and Pollyfiller, nail clippers and file, I set about the build. This certainty made me value the work that goes behind the scenes to craft tools specific for scale modelling! The builds went well, with the only fly in the ointment being that 4 of the 6 pots of acrylic paint were dried up and unusable. A return to the garden centre and the raiding of another couple of new kits resolved this, but why Airfix continue to rollout Starter Kits with this issue is beyond me.
I was going to wait until I got home to apply the decals over a nice smooth layer of varnish but having completed the builds all too quickly and with still no sign of my wheels, I pressed on with the ‘in the field’ build, just as my younger self would have all those years ago. What innocent fun I had
