You can almost smell the sea...

I have always been an estuary and small seaside fan.  But something that always put me off modelling same was the apparent impossibility of reproducing lobster pots. Some call 'em lobster traps, for that is exactly what they do.
What I need to reproduce is this sort of scene.

Especially those pesky orange netted things...and quite a few of 'em too.  I didn't want them in orange or the also common (these days) blue, but just that manilla-ish hemp looking affair on a slightly barnacled framework.  Something sufficiently plausible to be stacked, as they usually are, about the place near harbours and sheds.

The main problem was finding a mesh small enough to represent the netting.  A very fine thread making a mesh of about 0.75mm. was called for.  If I could find that, I could then make a framework from brass or nickel silver wire, soldered up and then glue the mesh over it.

To my surprise, after only a short while thumbing through ebay, I found what looked to be a very usable mesh in white. I ordered a chunk, which came with free delivery. How DO these companies do that!?  Everything I send, even second class costs a bloody fortune these days, yet there are those who send something worth less than the cheapest postage free of postage fees.  I'm almost embarrassed to do it!  Almost.

Sure enough it turned up in a couple of days and seems to be exactly what I needed.  Trouble is, my worktops are both white.  And I cannot see this stuff when it's on white!  That's how fine it is.  I shall have to organize a bit of black stuff to make lobster pots on.

Now I have never had the slightest luck with superglue since it first appeared, except for gluing loose bits of set Milliput filler back onto masters or gluing broken polyurethane resin mouldings. Both of these things it does very well, but anything else?  Forget it.  Including, it seems, model lobster pot netting, which said glue completely ignored.  The only other stuff I had was some 151 clear glue, a bit like UHU, a bit like Bostik. Of these two I would always elect to try UHU and so this was pressed into use and blow me down with a battery fan if it didn't work straight away!   Even stayed on well enough for me to use a pair of scissors to trim the bottoms and ends back to the wire frame and then to cut and trim the end panels to the correct shapes.  This, then, gave me what I have tried to do for so long, a half decent, plausible looking lobster pot, a couple of scale feet long and proportionately high and wide.  Three sticks of wire were glued to the outside according to pictures and the whole thing painted with Vallejo flesh coloured paint to represent the sunbaked, sea-washed netting.  I shall make another one today, so I can say I have made a stack of pots.  All two of them.  I should also say that I have no idea howto photograph them!  But you get the idea.