Nuts'n'bolts...

                                                                               

After a year I am nearing the end of the Vincent Black Shadow master. Obviously it doesn't actually TAKE a year. Other stuff has been done, other things have to be waited for, reference material gathered, visits arranged and made to sketch and measure real ones, etc.  Having made the components there is then, with such a big and complete model, a period of checking.  Checking that things fit in place, checking clearances and fits generally, checking that I haven't forgotten anything, and most of all....checking all the nuts and bolts.  Yes, nuts and bolts.  Whilst they are not actually threaded, they are obvious in their presence and most actually do keep things in place. They HAVE to be there and they are so easy to miss while you make bigger, more obvious , perhaps more challenging parts. It's perfectly natural top miss a tiny bolt when you've just sculpted a magneto cover or one of those ludicrously abstract cylinder heads.

These are relevant to the wheels and front suspension.

The essence of the front suspension,  the legs, bristling with dummy nuts and bolts, but if the legs are shiny black the polished faces of the chrome look nuts and bolts will contrast beautifully.

I'm hoping one more day should see it done, then all off to the white metal caster, resin moulder and tyre maker.  And I can take a break.  I have some boats to restore.

Oh and a 1/43rd scale 'bike and N gauge locos and a Gypsy Moth aeroplane and, and, and...

Make do and mend...

At the weekend I've decided to leave the big stuff behind and just do jobs for me.  Of course that usually morphs into Kanyerjustas. You know...Kanyerjust sort that door out, Kanyerjust top up the pond, etc.  Today the light seems to have run out after all that lovely summer and Indian summer and it's pissing down with rain.
I did get a bit done yesterday. I finished the carrying case for the Crash Tender and painted some bits on the wee Star SY 3 yacht restoration.  I'm really getting a taste for this restoration lark. It has more challenges than making new.  And making do and mending has always been my main interest. I know I can make new. I've nothing to prove there, but restoring is always something new to think about.

The Star yacht with the first coat of enamel on the lower hull.

Tinplate fittings scraped free of rust and mast repaired from 2 broken halves.

The front slides down hammered aluminium angles.  The case will eventually have stands to keep the boat's prop and rudder off the floor.  Now I have to make similar for the Vanity yacht,Chris Craft, the Darby One Design and the Greavette.  Then where do they all go?!

Give me strength!!...

Tonight I watched less than half of a new TV series called the Great Model Railway Challenge.  It had been advertised for weeks and I'd had time to ponder how awful it would almost certainly be.  But, Ye Gods I hadn't bargained for the disaster that met me at 8 o'clock on Friday evening.  To think my dear wife had foregone Gardeners' World for this drivel.

Three teams of baggy arsed, pot bellied old farts, recently ( or otherwise) pensioned off from, no doubt, well pensioned jobs got together to be given completely predictably stupid and irrelevant tasks to acheive with an 8x4 roundy roundy train set. I do NOT consider any part of their magnifying headsets, overpriced Noch electro static grass applicators or round ring desk lamps to be anything whatever to do with model railways.No amount of airbrushery where a paint brush would do will make a bodger into a modelmaker.  The one encouraging scene was where one old boy on being shown the scratchbuilding challenge, declared with some disgust that he was a modelmaker, not a clown.
That challenge had to be explained by the producer/presenter so that people knew what was scratchbuilding. It too had nothing to do with modelmaking being the insistence on the use of a high heeled shoe and a lipstick!  An ugly ginger denim wearing token female, more at home on Big Brother, I would have thought, warned she would be looking for creativity.  God forbid!

I have to confess, at that point, I too was missing Monty Don and told my wife to switch back to something realistic and interesting.

This debacle follows another model series that was bloody rubbish, where a team of British (always has to be a team doesn't it?) model flyers challenged a team of German model flyers to relive the Battle of Britain with models. For the most part the models, all built to one standard...low, were appallingly badly flown to the point that one could not discern what was happening, except for one pilot and SHE (HE...IT) was a transgender!  How thoroughly Media of them.  Apparently, on that occasion "we" beat the Jerries.  How would we know.  I have not watched that again, either.

There seems to be a kind of terminal unwritten statement in the Media that modelmaking must be pilloried and ridiculed out of existence and since the screen is everybody's modern bible they will do it by TV.