Warbird Information Exchange

Whats you biggest modelling screw up?

Mine was when I was about 12 and was building a model of a Mirage III...

that wasn't the screw up

I built it with gear down but it was tail heavy. My father gave me some lead fishing weights and told me to glue them into the nose cone.
Guess who didn't understand how model glue works.....
4-5 lead balls and a half a tube of model cement....
Lets just say the nose cone was less cone shaped after that. However, it did sit on all three wheels now.

I've had a lot of good ones haha. The OA-4M debacle that I'm going through in another thread right now is probably at the top of the list. A couple good ones I had from building as a teenager:

I built the 1/48 Esci AD-4N Skyraider because I wanted to do a Korean War aircraft with the bubble windows in the side. The kit was a dog, but that's another story. I was advised by someone at the local hobby shop to use two-part epoxy on the wing-fuselage joint. I glued the wings and fuselage together and set it aside for 24 hours. When I picked up the model the next day, the wings immediately fell off. Turns out out I used the same part of the two-part epoxy twice .

When I built the 1/72 Monogram X-15, I spilled paint thinner all over the decal sheet. I ended up with an all-black model with no decals.

Scott Rose wrote:Whats you biggest modelling screw up?

Mine was when I was about 12 and was building a model of a Mirage III...

that wasn't the screw up

I built it with gear down but it was tail heavy. My father gave me some lead fishing weights and told me to glue them into the nose cone.
Guess who didn't understand how model glue works.....
4-5 lead balls and a half a tube of model cement....
Lets just say the nose cone was less cone shaped after that. However, it did sit on all three wheels now.

HAHA, I wish it were that simple. I did the same thing on many tri-gear models but I was smart enough to use Elmer's glue so it didn't damage the aircraft. Though as a kid growing up in the days before we knew about the dangers of such things, I wasn't smart enough about the lead split-shot... It was hard to hold the model, pour the glue, pick up the fishing weights... needed more than two hands. Sooooo, guess what idiot held those weights in his mouth until needed and then dropped them into place! Yeah, you know the things we hear about lead these days and the side effects?... I can tell you they're true and not fun...

First 10 times I tried to paint canopy frames...till I got a micro sized brush

One I can think of was wasting time, money, and energy carefully building four copies of the Hawk/Testor 1/48 F8F Bearcat before I realized how badly shaped that kit actually is. I eventually figured out that you can do some simple mods and get a fairly decent -1 out of it (there's no practical way to get a good-looking -2, which is what the kit's SUPPOSED to be), and then I built two more that I'm still proud of.

I probably have another half-dozen copies of this kit in the Snakepit, and plan to actually build a few of them someday. But they'll all be converted to -1s.

Scott Rose wrote:Whats you biggest modelling screw up?

Mine was when I was about 12 and was building a model of a Mirage III...

that wasn't the screw up

I built it with gear down but it was tail heavy. My father gave me some lead fishing weights and told me to glue them into the nose cone.
Guess who didn't understand how model glue works.....
4-5 lead balls and a half a tube of model cement....
Lets just say the nose cone was less cone shaped after that. However, it did sit on all three wheels now.

Same thing when I was 12. 1/72 Revell P-70(A-20) Night Fighter. You could see the BB's sinking through the bottom of the nose cone.

Back 7~8 years ago when I got back into modeling I started with a 1/72 Hasagawa P-51D that I painted as Ted Contri's red Mustang. When I was basically done painting I realized that the front of the canopy was part of the cowling and I had left it off until later.
That one sat on the shelf of doom for ~5 years until I was brave enough to finish it without screwing it up.