Dodging another disaster

I would blame my rampant ham-handedness on age, but I was like this when I was 30. There was a near-disaster in the modelling dungeon today, which only panic and an extra kit in the stash allowed me to avoid.

I've been putting together the new tool Revell BAe Hawk. This will be the third in my mini Red Arrows project. The effort has seemed to be a bit snakebit from the start, with parts that didn't want to align correctly and some that were just too bloody small for a sausage-fingered twit like me to easily handle. I think much of this is a self-inflicted wound. But the big problem came when I started masking the canopy.

The Hawk is very easy to mask; no complicated framing. But somehow, as I was painting the grey sealer strip prior to masking it up for the overall RA Red paint, I managed to get the world's most perfect glue thumbprint right in the middle of the canopy. I am honestly not sure where the glue came from. I hadn't actually started gluing anything yet in this particular session. But there must have been some somewhere on the bench, unless I have been modelling so long that I am starting to exude Tenax from my skin.

I first tried polishing it out, but my range of sandpapers just aren't fine enough to do anything other than fog the canopy further. After a few minutes of deciding whether to consign this one to the round file, I remembered there was an Italeri Hawk T2 downstairs that I had already partially cannibalized to replace some gear doors that I had lost on an earlier Hawk adventure. But honestly, what were the chances that two canopies from different kits - different companies - were going to be anywhere close to fitting the same.

Rather high, as it turns out. It wasn't an exact fit, but the area of misalignment is small, and probably not noticeable if you don't know to look for it (which unfortunately, you do, now). It won't be a perfect model, but I'm not sure that any of my 450 completions would qualify for that. But at least it isn't on its way to the landfill.

Closing out the month was a short airbrush session where I put the top coats on the Ju-287 and the Airfix ragwing Hurricane. Plus I painted the wheel wells of that Hawk. And a few miscellaneous metal bits.