Advanced Modeller Syndrome

If you live long enough you realise you’re suffering from AMS. It creeps up on you, takes you unawares, and what seemed like enviable thoroughness when you were younger, and became a matter of what you get out of it for what you put into it when you were all grown up, has been skewed toward superdetailing because it’s the thing to do.

I try to avoid giving in to AMS. On the one hand I will make the best of a kit cockpit rather than getting deep pockets and dropping in some resin beauty, but on the other, there are times that extra detail is well within my grasp and costs nothing but patience and skill.

Having studied the M1 tank for many years from a detailing standpoint, I am still learning about it and discovering where the kit companies simplified things. Many of those details are not difficult to add, such as missing lift lugs on the rear end made from wire, drilling out the towing points, that sort of thing. Due to the limitations of moulding technology in decades gone by, you’ll often find missing bolt heads, and they’re easy to replace with slivers of rod of the appropriate thickness.

Twenty thou rod replaces missing bolts easily, but when I started doing the same with .040” rod I had to ask myself if there wasn’t a good reason Tamiya ignored them. Shaving them from the end of the rod, many would simply vanish into the dust on my cutting mat. I placed them on the tank turret to be able to see them against the tan plastic. To place them, I wiped all the liquid glue off the bottle brush I could, then put the tiniest remaining spot of glue over a pencil mark. The sliver of plastic was manipulated by breathing gently on the curved point of my scribing tool and using that to ‘catch’ it so it could be deposited in the glue and nudged into place.

About that time I asked myself what I was doing, and besides the usual wry responses one always silently generates, I did feel a certain flush of satisfaction that I could accomplish this at all. Skills develop all through our days, and I have the strongest impression I have a great deal more to learn.