Purely from a ‘learn valuable lessons for the next project’ standpoint, project First Pancake has been an overwhelming success! The list of things I’ve irrevocably fucked up is rather impressive.
Final assembly turned out to be something of a bitch. I won’t waste to much time detailing just how wrong it went, but suffice it to say that a number of pieces didn’t line up quite as well as the instructions would indicate. Yours truly then exacerbated the problem by assembling a couple of pieces in the wrong order. The next thing you know, I’ve got a broken fan under the hood (I put the broken blade facing down so it won’t be seen) and the rear bumper is separated from the body by a very noticeable amount. That is not even mentioning that I currently have some pieces of it shimmed up with scrap sprue while I reglue other pieces that I managed to break off during the process. Indeed, I am learning up a storm over here.
Honestly, this thing looks better in the pictures than it does in person. I’m thinking that once I finish it I may just take a picture of it and put it on the mantle in lieu of the actual model. At the very least, I need to make sure that no one looks at it from any closer than about three feet, which seems to be the magical distance at which it still looks pretty good. Perhaps all the lessons I learn will make the next one look good from two feet, then the next one from one foot, then decrease the distance by inches until you can actually hold it and it still looks good.
It is rather frustrating, but it shouldn’t be. I watched a ton of videos and read countless articles on various techniques, but that doesn’t mean I know how to do any of it. I shouldn’t have expected perfection. It’s like if you decide one day that you want to play baseball; you can buy a bat and a glove, watch hundreds of games, read all you want about how to swing the bat -where to hit the ball- to knock it out of the park. But the first time you swing the bat, it’s not likely to be a home run. Understanding how to do something is far different than actually doing it, it seems. The good news is that my frustration is directly attributable to my own boneheaded mistakes and rather than wanting to give up (take my ball and go home) I’m excited to finish this one -as terrible as it will be- so I can try to make the next one better. If that fails, I’ll just go with the showing off pictures instead of the actual models thing, that seems to work pretty well.