The First Mistake of Many!

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So it really didn’t take long for me to make my first mistake when building this kit. As is almost always recommended for model aircraft I started with the cockpit. Sub assembly wasnt without issue due to the poor quality of the moulding with my kit, some parts clearly hadn’t had enough plastic resin injected into them and were actually incomplete!
But the whole point of this kit was too blow off the cobwebs and I knew I was going to make many errors on the way so I wasnt too fussed. The parts were assembled and detail painted.

As I mentioned its been a fair few years since I have built a kit, and I pretty much have always been a brush painter. The last kit I built which was an F-117 I did play about with a couple of cheap airbrushes running on cans of propellant as a tool for mass coverage but thats about it. Well being at the Model Show and seeing peoples results from using an airbrush and I was a convert.

I managed to convince my better half to buy me a small compressor and airbrush (more about which can be found in the equipment section soon) so of course I needed a booth with extractor naturally. Well it all pretty much arrived at the the same time.

So I’ve taken my time getting here but here was mistake number one, all my
new toys arrived and I was just itching to give them all a go so no sooner was I home from work that everything was unboxed, set up and ready to go. I cemented the fuselage together (ignoring the horrific fit and step between the two halves) and got to airbrushing on a primer and then the base grey coat.

It wasn’t until after this though that I noticed, sitting on the desk in front of the new spray booth and the freshly painted carcass of the F-5, was the cockpit sub assembly, you can actually see it in the photo above, sitting next to the craft knife on the right. In my rush I had forgotten all about it and had to crack the fuselage back open to install it!

So what is it that keeps bringing me back?

As I mentioned in the initial post scale models are a hobby that I
have had an on again off again affair with since I was a child. It’s
difficult to say what it is that keeps bringing me back to it. It’s
certainly something I enjoy doing, there’s some thing really satisfying
about watching what ever it is you are building slowly taking shape in
your own hands.

I’ve always enjoyed making things, even as a child, then again during my
apprenticeship in engineering. Even now in my current mainly office
based job, the times I enjoy the most at work are those when I get
to leave my monitor and keyboard for a while and head into the workshops
to actually produce the required goods.  I guess the creation part of
the hobby is certainly the biggest appeal to me, but I also appreciate
the finished articles too.

So what bought me back this time? Well I last built a kit probably around 8
or 9 years ago and then as life does, it got in the way. I still had a
few kits sitting in the spare room unbuilt and one of my customers from
work invited me to attend the Scottish National Scale Model Show to meet
him and see some of the build he and his club were displaying there.
Unfortunately I didn’t actually get to meet the customer but I was again
taken in by the world in miniature on display.

The builds at the show were amazing and all the vendors selling kits and
after market parts etc. Well it whet my appetite so I decided to buy a
cheap kit to get back into things and start building again. After much
time spent lusting after many of the kits on sale I finally settled on
an F-5E Tiger II by Revell in 1/48 Scale out of pure nostalgia for the
aircraft as its one I have loved since childhood.