Close to Home

Last week the news could talk about little else than the disaster in Japan but the novelty seems to have worn off, they’re back to the staples of politics, crime and celebrity hijinx. Now you need to dig online to find that the radiation levels in Miyagi are now 100, 000 times the normal background levels, and that fallout has been detected in the environment as far away as Michigan. But it seems an impending British royal wedding is far more important than keeping people informed as to how bad the situation is – or constitutes a diversion from it.

Okay, off the soapbox and back to regular programming – but it was brought home to me sharply today when I dropped by my LHS for some Tamiya paint. I had used up my NATO Black and needed another coat on the tires for three tanks, including the StuG IV featured in my last post, and am down to a drop of German Dark Yellow also, but could only source the black. The chap on the counter checked the chain’s other store to see if they could have the yellow sent down for me, but it was sold out there also. Why? Japan…

One doesn’t normally think of the hobby supply chain being as time-sensitive as this. One imagines a container-load of stuff comes from a particular ‘industry of origin’ in to a particular distributor and is shared out around the country maybe two or three times a year, but a fortnight after a disaster in the country of origin supply is in a serious pinch here in Australia, and that makes you do a double-take.

Where would we be without our plastics-derived materials science? Quite apart from the health concerns, that microscopic particles of plastic migrate through our bodies and come to rest within our very living cells (and we plastic modellers must be more at risk of this than other parts of the community that have less intimate relationships with plastic than ours, which include solvent chemistry and sanding and other means of breaking it down into ever finer parts…), we seem to be highly dependent on plastic for our amusement. How many of us willingly grab a piece of natural wood and get to work building a replica? Well, that’s another stream of the hobby, isn’t it…? How many of us set up our lathe and milling machine and start knocking out working steam locomotives? That’s another part of the hobby. too. How many would tackle a wooden ship kit that costs a year’s savings? I’m not saying that any of these things is outside the hobby, I’m saying our stream is plastic modelling and as such is plastics-dependent. Interrupt the supply and we’ll feel it.

Back at the time of Desert Storm (“Gulf War I” for those who don’t remember that Iran and Iraq had been at war for ten years previously, referred to in the international media for that entire period as “the Gulf War”) it was discussed in the pages of FineScale Modeler and elsewhere that an international oil crisis would impact the hobby by changing the cost structures of manufacturing plastic. As it happens, this did not trickle down into any serious impediment to the hobby, but it illustrates the same sort of dependency.

But where can we go without plastics or resins? Could any of us seriously set about building, say, a tank model, from wood? It’s not impossible, and would be a most interesting challenge… It would certainly foster one’s carpentry skills, and oblige one to be a craftsman in the old sense of the word, a machinist and tradesman. Building intricate, working models was something tradesmen used to do, and many of them are still found in museums. Engineers’ models for ship yards are a perfect example of precision scale modelling of a sort the world sees too little of today.

I wonder… A wooden Sherman or Tiger…? Lathed wheels, carved turret, lathed barrel, and so forth, and a hull planed from timber (the welded-hull M3A4 Sherman would be a prime candidate, or either main variant of the Tiger, with its milled slab armour). Fill the wood grain with woodstop or some homebrew filler of dope and a fine powder medium. Detail would be difficult, that’s for sure. Metal, probably... And those tracks would be rather obliged to be cast link by link, probably in whitemetal, pinned together and end up workable... And paint? Even our non-toxic mainstays are derived from plastic! (Which is worse for us, plastic or solvent fumes?) It’s all an interesting idea but is it really possible to obtain the realism and ease we expect in any other medium? Perhaps not.

I'm sure every one of us hopes and prays that Japan will get solidly on top of its shocking problems in the near future, and this will be wonderful for every imaginable human reason; certainly the road back for them will be neither swift nor simple. But, we may acknowledge with a certain chagrin, there are also the entirely unique needs of the hobby community, which has come to depend on Japan’s prolific engineering and commercial output to a considerable degree. In subtle ways, we’re already missing them.