I know this is off topic… but Thursday night I had the worst injury I’ve ever got while building a model. I was switching between work on my 1/72 King Tiger and 1/72 k1n1 shinden and while working on the plane… I used to much CA and accelerate and while try to fix this mess with my exacto I slipped and sliced my left thumb. This required a trip to the ER and 4 stiches. And 1 missed day at work.
So I was wondering what is the worst injury other have had while building a model?
Mine was similar… I was under the impression that you could put some blade pressure on your finger as long as there was no “slicing” motion and you would be ok. But one day I found out that there is a point where it does not matter if the blade is moving laterally at all, if the downward pressure is enough, it will act as a guillotine. It was, of course, a fresh #11. And it was a good 1/8-1/4 inch deep cut. It hurt badly… nothing a spongebob bandaid and some neosporin can’t fix.
Or duct tape.
Oh, also, i have this thing with testing the flammability of all new hobby liquids…
I usually have bad luck myself with new #11 blades.But i found by having a couple of bandaids and some quick drying super glue near by will close a cut rather quickly.BTW anyone know the best way to get blood stains out of carpet?
Meat tenderizer works well… just take some and mix with water to make a paste. Apply to carpet. The enzymes in the tenderizer will break down the blood. Then you clean up with warm water.
I had my X-acto knife with a fresh #11 blade roll off my work bench, which then fell straight down point first and impaled my thigh. The tip of the blade ripped right through a very thick pair of jeans and the blade made it about halfway into my leg leaving about a 1/4" very deep cut. This was probably 4 months ago and it still hasn’t really healed. It hurt too! [B)]
While soldering PE in the early morning a drop of liquid lead decided to leave the soldering iron and follow gravity to say hello to Willy.
I had a pyama on but you guys all know Murphy…
When I was getting back into this hobby after a ten-year hiatus, I was trying to open an old bottle of paint that had gotten particularly stuck. I tried everything: gave the bottle a couple of raps with a small hammer to loosen the paint; chipped away as much of the muck as I could… then I brought out the Big Guns, the channel locks pliers.
No good. I gave the bottle a couple more whacks, cracking the bottle but of course I didn’t know that, as the bottle’s shoulders were dark with paint.
I grabed the bottom of the bottle in my right hand, the channel locks in my left and applied appropriate pressure. The top half of the bottle broke off, the broken glass slicing nicely into the knuckle of my right forefinger.
I had about an inch and a half gash, an eighth to a quarter inch deep, but cleaned it with rubbing alcohol and held it together until it set well enough to put a bandaid or three on it.
Bleed like a stuck pig and I’ve got a nice scar.
But the worse thing is the shorts I was wearing have a shi*load of silver paint on them that hasn’t come out in three years of laundering! So they are now my permanent modeling shorts.
Just recently working on Jenn’s “Snow Dancer” horse model base–I tried to ply off the Celluclay, in order to alter the base, and was trying to get under it with the ol’ #11–well, you know what happened–it slipped out and slashed upwards and through the skin on the side of the 2nd knuckle of my middle finger–about a 1/2 inch cut, luckily though not TOO deep! Took a few band-aids with tissue paper inside to stop bleeding over a period of about 1/2 hour, and took a month to heal and left a nice pink scar. Cool.
Looking back on it, I can’t help thinking "How STOOOOPID of me!!!" [(-D]
I’ve gashed myself countless times with a sharp knife blade over the years. The absolute worst model-related injury though for me goes back to the first time I tried to stretch sprue over an open flame…the sprue melted, then caught fire, then the molten ball of plastic detached from the sprue and landed on my outstretched forearm. Oddly enough it didn’t hurt for more than about half a second…but it created a nice “brand” scar that I have to this day. [8-]
My worst injury came when building a 1/72 FAMO and 88mm AA gun when I was about 10 years old.(I think it was an MPC kit,maybe Airfix).I sliced the dogsh*t outta my left thumb(with the x-acto ofcourse).It was Christmas afternoon and the gash wouldn’t stop bleeding.The really FU part is my grandmother had a stroke that morning.I showed no one my thumb cause I didn’t want to freak anybody out.They’d been through enough that day already.I just walked around with my had in my pocket for a while.It took over an hour for the bleeding to stop.I probably should have got stitches,but we didn’t need another trip to the hospital that day.
I did the exact same thing at age eight, except that I was in the backyard, playing war with those soft green plastic tanks that were roughly 1/32nd scale and came with a bag of little green army men. My friend Dave and I were culminating the battle, the tanks were burning, and I just had to poke the smoldering hulk with a stick. A glob of burning plastic hit me on the wrist and in the right light, you can see the scar, 40 years later!
Holy sh*t that’s nuts. The underside of my forearms got burned couple times at work, but nothing even remotely close to what you endured.
I solder a lot of IC boards at work so I used to use the electric solders for PE too, they didn’t work well. A butane torch worked better. Place very small chunks (maybe 0.5mm cube) of solder at the joining place, and the surface tension will suck that liquid right into the crack, no dripping.
Spot welders for dentists are the best, but not exactly cheap.
[#ditto] Once I went the extra mile and coated one of my older builds in all sorts of CA, testors and tamiya cement…It didn’t occur to me till after that thats more of a thing to do outside.[D)][swg]
As a first aid tip, if you can’t find a bandage quick enough, use CA glue to close the wound together. They have actually been using it as a repalcement for stitched in minor cases.
True! I dated a single mom that raised 3 children…binding all cuts and gashes with superglue. I thought she was nuts until I had to try it once. Works like a charm.
Slightly off-topic…I build and install sheetmetal ductwork for a living…(Think of a #11 blade that also tears while it cuts, if you get careless)
Went my doctor for a scheduled appt…he kept looking at my hands and asked me how I cut myself so much. He sprayed some solution on my hand and shone a black light on it (he does forensic work for the police)
We counted 100+ scars on my right hand before we got bored. That’s fingers, palm and back of hand. I always have band-aids and CA in my toolbox!
I had to think about this one for awhile? Don’t have too much to report thankfully I guess. Of course there’s always those times when I’m trying to thumb through a reference book and I suddenly realize that each page gets hung up from being released by my fingers due to lil serrations suffered from an X-acto blade while I’d previously scraped away seams working the blade backwards towards my thumb? I never feel those fine cuts but the pages later on prove they’re there!
But then I do recall once when I was around eleven I was ‘clearing’ out the spray nozzle on a can of rattle paint and somehow had it pointed back at me? I realized the spray blobs had hit my face and even the eyes but when examining myself in the mirror I somehow now had two ‘candy red’ specks of color in my otherwise hazel iris? They’re there to this day too!