I have to agree with you Rob. I really miss the old Pactra liquid glue.
It worked slowly enough that one had time to put the parts together
before the glue evapourated. Testors can probably do it but the stuff
always makes me ill. Now I'm using Plasticweld and sometimes I'm not as
fast as it is.
OTOH, every so often I crack open a really old Humbrol tin and the aroma
takes me way back. That gets to be a rarer event as time goes on.
The kits: Well for one thing there is plenty of interior detail. The
first few kits I built had essentially hollow fuselages that one could
look through. Pilots were either little bumps moulded on a flat plane
where the cockpit was supposed to be or they were stuck on pegs coming
out from the inside of the fuselage where one could see them floating in
a void under the canopy.
References are far more satisfactory - and not, at the same time. We've
come to expect that we'll find what we need when once we didn't know
what we needed, or that we needed it. I can recall when I started
building 'seriously' back in junior high and all I had to go on was the
books in the school library which were illustrated chiefly with
publicity photos from the DOD. It wasn't until 1967 and my discovery of
a copy of "Scale Modeler" that I found out there were others with the
same afflictions. Prior to that I figured I was the only non-kid
building model planes and certainly the only crazy one in this locality.
The abundance of resin detail parts seems to have made doing them
yourselves obsolete. I guess this makes a super-detailled model more
easily attained but to me the building is the fun. It's part of the
trip, the end of which is the finished model. Unfortunately, I have way
too many unfinshed trips here. ;]
Bill Banaszak, MFE
- posted 16 years ago