The inevitable has happened

Last weekend I completed numbers 10 and 11 of my Airfix project: -

10) Dennis Fire Engine

Along with the Type B Bus, Airfix offered a model of a 1914 Dennis Fire engine. Unlike the bus this model was never really high up my to buy list, but looking back I do wish that I’d had a go back in the day. Dennis were a British firm manufacturing specialist vehicles, and they manufactured fire engines until 2007.

If I’m totally honest I am not 100% sure if this is the exact same model of Dennis fire engine as the Airfix model was, but it’s certainly of the right era.

11) 1930 41/2 Litre Bentley

This was, I think, a larger model than some others of Airfix's vintage car range and some how it grabbed my imagination.

The Inevitable . . .

Right, the inevitable. The whole project came about through my thinking about the Airfix models that got away – models that I never made when I was a kid and kind of wish that I had. I have said on this very blog that I had no intention of building them now.

The reason is that I did try to build an Airfix model 3 or 4 years ago. It was an Aston Martin DB5 starter kit – which came with glue and the necessary paints. I bought it on ebay. Maybe this was why the glue was very weak and hardly worked. The parts didn’t fit very well. As for the paint, it would not coat the plastic at all. It was a very frustrating experience. So – thought I – I don’t like modelling any more and I don’t plan to do it again.

Well, since finishing the 30x30 challenge and starting painting my Airfix challenge, I’ve been doing a little research to try to find out the models which were around in my 70s heyday which I never actually built. I’ve watched quite a few videos of builds on Youtube, looked at the official Airfix group on Facebook and slowly rethought my attitude. Last weekend I took my oldest grandson Ollie to the Helicopter Museum in Weston Super Mare. They have several Bristol Belvederes there. By Thursday I had decided that I was going to give modelling another try. I popped into our local Hobbycraft after work on Thursday and bought the Airfix Bristol Belvedere and a small tube of glue.

I didn’t buy any paints. They’re not ideal, but I knew that Arcylic paints would work okay on plastic, and I have plenty of those at home. If I do build another model then I'll start to get some proper enamels, but I wasn't tooling up just for one kit. This morning I built the model. Now, looking on the positive, the glue worked fine. The instructions were clear and the build pretty simple. Or rather it should have been. I don’t know how old the tooling is, but some of the parts had wee bits of plastic hanging off them, while the slots for the tailplanes were far too small to fit the tabs into. I mean, I remember using my penknife to do a bit of fettling when I was a kid, but nothing like as much as this.

I also rediscovered the delights of hunting the small piece of plastic that you’ve just dropped on the carpet.

The acrylic paint worked okay, but I needed three coats of white to even make it just about acceptable. As for the decals, well, I might have been better off masking off the thing blue lines and painting them in. Trouble is my fingers are now a lot fatter and older and more arthritic than they were when I was a kid. Still, there it is. It’s really not that well built or painted, but what I was looking for was the complete experience of building and painting one of the ones that got away, and I’ve had that. Did I enjoy it? Well, actually, not noticeably more than I enjoyed making my watercolour painting of the Belvedere, and that was a lot quicker. Will I do it again? Dunno. Watch this space.