Okay - let’s all confess to our most careless mistake. I know this will be hard, but let’s do it so others will learn (and get a few laughs).
Here’s mine:
I started a 1/48 P-51D mustang a few days ago and glued the fuselage together before installing the rear wheel. aahhh!
Lesson learned: never assume from experience, always check instructions and plan out assembly ahead of time.
Mine are ALWAYS related to my impatience…
The most recent one included installing a canopy with glue and painting the ‘edge’. Since this was just about the last step, I was very eager to polish everything up and put it on display. Unfortunately, I started wiping the canopy before the glue and paint were completely dry. Created a nice mess on both the canopy and the fuselage…
I resisted the urge to test out the model’s durability vs. the concrete wall in my basement.
M.
Paccardi reminded me of my most recent big blunder. About 2 years ago I built an 1/48th Airfix Spitfire 5. A day after assembling the wing to the fuselage, I realized I had forgotten the rudder pedal/control stick sub assembly !
Another big one also involved a Spitfire. I took a finished Hasegawa 1/32nd Spitfire 5 to a local hobby shop to be put on display. One of the fellows who worked there pointed out a big finger print in the paint on the engine cowl - right where it was easily noticed ! I took it home, sanded and repainted. The original paint job was weathered, so the repaint just looked like part of the weathering process.
Jim
Just remembered a big one by a buddy of mine when we were about 10 or 11 years old. Remember the Aurora 1/48th P-51H ? Had retractable landing gear, so the gear struts had to be placed in the lower wing halves before the upper halves were glued on. He glued the wings together without the gear struts being there. I never let him forget it, and when I built that kit I made damn sure I remembered the gear !
I remember that while that kit was of the P-51H, the really nice illustration on the box was of a P-51D.
Jim [:o)]
I always make some kind of mistake due to impatience…but one of my biggest was not impatience, but overthinking. I had thought about doing one step so much that I forgot to do it…or rather, I thought that I had already done it. After completing the next step I then realized that I had not completed the step that should have already been completed…DOH! [:D]
Jerry
My big mistake was not stopping when I should have. I was working on an F-15
VERY late the night before my first Buffcon show and thought “hey, a little bit of airbrushed weathering on this would make it look great!” Well I was spraying away and to my shock, and I do mean jaw dropped, holy begeebers shock, the color cup fell off my airbrush and all over the wing. I ended up wiping the paint off as best I could, repainting the wing and then going over the decals with thinner to get them to show again. Since this day there is still a big glob off paint on the bottom of the wing that formed as the paint ran from the top to the bottom and pooled. I now use a gravity fed airbrush or make sure the cup is on REALLY tight.
Whaz up,
Does anybody have a Snickers???
I really cant remember what a/c it was but it was one of my first builds that my dad wasn’t around to guide me.
I had come back to the bench after gluing my fuselage together and noticed a cockpit sitting off to the side. I thought when did dad start another kit??
Well lo and behold it was my cockpit which I had forgotten to glue in before I glued the halfs together. Can you say DUH…!!![:p]
Flaps up, mike
not sure if this takes the cake as MOST careless (man do I have to do some pondering on THAT one) but it IS my most recent.
I’m working on a 1/48 F-15I, using the Revel F-15E and Cutting Edge conversion set. I had some reference photos of the outside of F-15Is to show the paint scheme, different parts, etc, but none of the cockpit. No worries, I figured, as it’s ESSENTIALLY an F-15E so I worked off F-15E photos and painted accordingly, with black panels on gray consoles with gray sidewalls (typical US cockpit arrangement). Happy as a clam I cement the nose halves together and dress the seams.
A week leader I get my new copy of Air Forces Monthly, with an article about the F-15I. Turns out the Israelis paint EVERYTHING in the cockpit black so there’s no gray surfaces to reflect light and interfere with NVDs (with 100 NVD hours in the EA-6 I wasn’t quite aware of this problem). After some heavy thought, I decided the damage resulting from cracking open the canopy and repainting the cockpit wouldn’t quite be worth it, as the only people who would likely notice the blunder would be the ones to whom I pointed it out…
Lesson is, just when you think you’re done with research, you’re not…
I once painted a p 51 purple.
ROFL!!! i always seem to screw up when it comes to putting it on the shelf
I was painting a Boeing Sentry which I didn’t liked so I stripped the paint off the plane and radardish. So far so good after cleaning everything I repainted the plane it looked realy nice. I wanted to see who the radardish looked on the plane.
Left it there for a day or so. Came back and saw that the paint had gone from the rear part of the plane. Reason the radardish was filled with braking fluid, the fluid leaked onto the plane and stripped the paint right off the body. It took me several hours to clean the plane and radardish.
I don’t know which is my MOST careless one. So of them caused by ignorance or even stupidity. May be you folks can choose one for me:
I once built the Revell 1/32 Spritfire Mk I. I glued the left flap to the right wing and right flap to the left wing.
Similar to Case 1, I once glued the left propeller to the right engine in my Airfix P-38 and vice versa.
Trying to make my old Airfix 1/72 TBF Avenger looked remarkable, I once painted 12 tiny Japanese flags on it as kill marks.
After seeing the USAF insigna in the 70’s, I thought the decal in my Monogram 1/48 P-47 Thunderbolt was wrong. So I add a red stripe on the white area on the insigna and painted the word ‘USAF’ on the wing.
While painting a F-4 Phantom with brush, the phone rang. I rushed to the phone but left the brush on the wing!! When I returned, the paint dried. I pulled the brush hard, leaving hair on the brush got sticken on the wing.
Well, when you were 14 years old, you did a lot of crazy things.
I had already built 2 Revell 1/48 A-10’s, not realizing how much the tail section weighed. Well I went and got another one, spent about 6 mos. building, detailing, smoothing, painting, and arming it to the teeth!. Before I knew it thpthptptph!!! Nose in the air!! I had to cut just behind the front nose gear and attach lead weight in and patch up the bottom. Not the most professional thing to do to a model!
I don´t remember what model I was made, but I glued the halves of fuselage before glued the cub of propeller…the propeler never twirl
Reading that one with the Sentry and radar dish full of break fluid reminded me of something my dad told me once. When he was still flying private jets (HS-125’s with the old venom(?) engines) he flew out of Luton airport near London. At the end of the runway is the Vauxhall car factory with its car park. On one day this old 707 freighter took off, raised its gear, burst the hydraulic system and sprayed a few hundred freshly painted, brand new, still ownerless cars with one of the most aggressive substances short of acid: aviation hydraulic fluid. Every single car in the lot had to be resprayed…
OUCH!
Well, the one that sticks in my memory regards my 1/72 CP-140 Aurora patrol aircraft (built from Hasegawa’s 1/72 P-3C Orion).
I knew from the begining this thing was going to need a significant amount of nose weight to keep her on her nose gear. I ran back and forth through the house looking for something that would weigh it down well enough.
After three days of experimenting with various weighty objects with various degrees of a lack of success, I cast my eyes over to a broken stereo speaker that was going in the garbage. I pried the magnet of the back of the speaker cone and glued it to the back of the cockpit bulkhead and stuck the fuselage together.
After a few months on the shelf, I noticed the distance between the wheels, both nose and main were widening at the bottoms and narrowing at the tops.
Still have that model and the magnet’s still in it. One day I’ll pull it all down and redo it.
Screwing up is like any other job, if you’re going to do it, do it right!
A long time ago in a galaxy far away…
I was working the 3rd shift at a print shop while in college. At the time I was working on an A-10 and was not happy with the paint job on the flaps. I had access to acetone at work so I decided to help myself to a sprite bottle full. Needless to say styrene plastic does not fair to well with acetone. Not only did the paint come off but the flaps curled up like those fries you get at Arbys. That mistake made become very familiar with the chemicals you can use with plastic.
Dumb A** !!!
From the rest of the posts I’m glad to see I’m not the only person out there who acts before they think.
I was building a P-61 totally black with invasion stripes, the paint job was superb, a nice black and shiny color, when I started to airbrush the invasion stripes I had forgoten to put the plug on the other side of the airbrush… I felt this warm fuzzy feeling running across my fingers when I looked there was white paint all over the plane… even in the inside!!!
Mine was that whilst spraying a model of the Red Barron Starfighter (esci 1/72) I didnt take into consideration the close proximity of the jaws 2 A10 that i had recently finished…nice red spots dont make good camo. my mate Andy (who wont admit to this) had just completed a matchbox lysander when i called at his house. He told me he had loads of trouble getting the wings to fit i had a look and told him that i was not suprised as he had got them left to right and back to front. nice one Andy easy mistake to make HA HA HA cheers Gregers
Build a Hasegawa P-12E once and put just a wee bit too much tension on the rigging-I was using nylon fishing line- and a few days later noticed that I had a nearly perfect “V” on the lower wing assembly. That was a pin in the you know what to correct! - Ed