"Share your &*@%$!!! Hobby Moments" Topic

So the last few nights I've been painting up an old Chronopia snake-man that I found in the lead pile. I have no use for the miniature right now I just felt like a break from all the darkest Africa miniatures I've been painting up.

I built the multi-part miniature and filled all the gaps last weekend. I finished the painting on Tuesday, yesterday I varnished him without mis-hap. The miniature looked pretty good, if I do say so myself, and I was happy with how he turned out.

Tonight I just had to finish the basing. I did my mix of flock and pva glue and then prepared to add the final touch of some static grass tufts.

As I picked up the miniature my hand, brain and eyes had a brief failure or coordination and I watched, in slow motion horror, as my miniature fell out of my hand and tumbled end over end before hitting the ground and breaking into three pieces.

I picked up my broken miniature, stuck him on my painting desk,
stood up switched of the gaming room light and closed the door. Maybe I'll repair him tomorrow… if I can face it.

So guys cheer me up and share some of your crappy hobby moments :)

Painted 20 of over 100 28mm Vikings, hand painted shields, layers, based, the whole 9 yards. Went to dull cote in the cold and ended up with 20 vikings frosted like they were in the frozen reaches of Denmark!

Ouch I feel ya. I remember doing the same with a section of VBCW figures years ago.

I had a similar experience with "frosting" until I learned you didn't spray varnish in 90% humidity. My worsts experience though was when a fellow playing an ACW game picked up some losses from an attack and tossed them to the side of the table. I'm pleased that I managed to not pick him up and toss HIM against the wall but it was the lasts time we were in the same game.

H&R Franco-Prussians, painted, glued to a base--and then bent at the ankle about 90 degrees as I screwed up moving or storage at some point. Hardly any salvageable.

I've had that exact experience. I had just finished a 1/1200 sailing ship, after working on the rigging off and on over the course of a week. I put the last touch of paint on the last line of rigging, picked it up to look at it, and dropped it on the floor. The masts bent like play dough and the rigging looked like a jumble of spaghetti. I had to pull off all the lines and redo them, as they wouldn't be taught if I just straightened the masts.

I sat there and gaped at it for a few moments, then I put it aside and left to distract myself. I wasn't ready to face the repair work for a while. But eventually I came back to it and redid it all.

So take all the time you need, and remember it happens to us all!

Frosted stuff? … Check!
Was that clear coat or black primer? … Check!
Dropped and broke … Check! Check! Check!
Pieces glued better to my fingers than each other … Check!

"Mmmmmm … I love the sound of rain early in the morning."
"Uh … Honey … did you ever bring in those thick card and pressboard terrain pieces you primed yesterday afternoon …?"

Frosted Dull Coat on a newly painted unit of Confederate infantry – yep

Dropped a carefully painted mini and watched the head pop off – yep

Bought a tank at a show and then realized that the hull plate on the rear was missing – yep

All fixed, though!

Do a huge lake terrain piece (36 inches across). I do the best blending of water color ever. Pour the water effect and watch in horror as it slowly turn into a bowl as it dries. It met my garage wall in record time.

Just finished painting a mounted and foot Théoden new plastic model – and all ready for basing. left the paint room to re-fill my coffee cup, upon return found the dog chewing on something…….you guessed it both models – he sat there for hours watching me paint this model, not once did he ever show any interest. He purposely waited until I finished. All I found was the base and the feet and ankles of the man and horse….."Man's best Friend!!!

I carefully painted several ECW leaders, ready to be mounted on command stands. Went to spray coat them the next day. I doubt there is any one out there who doesn't know what happened next…you've probably all done it at one time or another, so I won't even bother to describe it. Just remember, keep your matte spray separate from your colored spray.

I was doing a bunch of 15mm Russkie tanks. I white spray primed a bunch of them in one session. When I checked back the priming had "crazed," developing a sort of powdery surface. I tried to salvage them by soft scrub brushing as much of the elevated surface as possible. I tried painting them and found the paint bled into the crazed surface creating a remarkably realistic "hard use" impression. The paint would not shed under hard finger rubbing. The surface was fast. Decals were out of the question, but these ended up being some of my best work.

Go figure.

Cleaning flash and mold lines when the hobby knife with a brand new blade slipped. Sliced right along the finger nail on my ring finger. 16 years ago and the nail still doesn't grow out right.

I had a friend who was helping me clean up after a game. He picked up a tray of 15mm artillery on an angle and 4 Russian limbers crashed to the ground and smashed apart. With gritted teeth I said it was ok, but the limbers were never the same after I glued them back together.

At least I have never had the varnishing disaster's although two of my friends have. In fact I became so paranoid about this happening that I now use brush on varnish. This actually works better than spray although you do get some shedding of flock from the bases.

Well, there was the time I was cutting a model bit from a piece of plastic sprue, while sitting indian-style on the floor, watching TV.

Plastic was pretty tough, so I applied more pressure to the X-Acto knife, and the plastic finally gave way, of course.

Managed to drive that blade into my thigh up to the handle, so got a quick trip to the emergency room for a few stitches, and wasted about 4 hours of my life doing that. Had a bit of a shock, and a deep breath, but strangely the cut didn't hurt at all. Had to take my jeans down to see if I was really cut at all by the blade tip.

Needless to say, stuff like this should be done over a firm wood or other table, and with something on top to protect its surface, when other slips and errant cuts inevitably occur.

No modeling parts were harmed in this episode, which is the only good part of the story.

Not paying close attention. Picked up my sealer and hit a unit of Napoleonic infantry. Ok, just 24 infantry at 15mm scale……wrong cap was on the can. Primer was now on my figures.

or worse. Was gluing something….holding it in both hands while the super glue gel dried. My X-acto rolled off the table and stood upright in my thigh. I DID NOT drop the figure.

I feel your pain thresher. Watched as my Exacto knife rolled off my desk. Auto reflexes took over and I closed my legs to catch it. Landed point down in my groin and stuck. Went through my jeans and into the inner thigh, fortunately nothing vital was hit!

Too many to count. They usually result from me bringing the thing I'm working on close, rather than moving myself closer to it, and, as a result, dropping it on the floor instead of the work table.

I really try to keep my elbows or at least forearms on the table now.

A lot of drops, for sure. The funniest (I can laugh now, really I can) was a wolf I had painted up as an arctic wolf. I spent the time painting, dry brushing and working to make him beautiful. I set him on my drying table and left for the afternoon only to return and found a basket full of laundry on the table instead. I asked my wife where she put the miniature and she said ‘what miniature?' I picked up the laundry basket and found a flattened piece next to a base with four stumps that were once legs. Somehow, I did manage to repair it into a semblance of a wolf who leaned ever so slightly to the left.

I somehow managed to remove the nozzle from a can of spraypaint and press down on the top, getting blasted right in the eyes with sky blue paint. The next 20 mins were sheer horror getting it cleaned out of my eyes & wondering if I'd permanently lost my sight… :-(

Yes, frosting was the most painful one.

In case it happens (mostly with Mat Varnish) have a can of gloss varnish ready and apply it immediately. It will remove the frost and allow you to re-apply mat varnish later.

Not sure why I was using steel wool on my table, or why I got it close to my pyro-gravure, but that stuff really burns!

Well those many tales of woe certainly cheered me up. Thanks guys :)

one of my favorite stories from 2 years ago ish..
When my daughter interacted with my 1/1200 ships..

TMP link

(gotta scroll down a little bit, TMP was being weird when I tried to post originally). lots of stories in that thread about children and miniatures…interactions.

-Stew

I may be in the minority here, but I always read the label on a spray can before I use it.

Sympathy for that .
May I suggest that you treat it as a "sign".
Try to weave it into a "that may have stopped me dong…."
As a result of you not doing ….
Your welfare/ life has been improved.
This "conning yourself" will make you feel god /saved and righteous.??

Otherwise identify some great thing that happened on the very same day?

Best of luck!

martin

Back when I was playing 40K I had just finished a nice, red, Ork dreadnought. Went to seal it and hit it with the can of black I was using as primer. After I finished cussing myself out for being an idiot, I decided to just touch it up a bit and tell everyone that it got hit with a plasma gun.

I was sealing two 15mm longboats. One had been mounted on a stand that was half land half water to use as a beached model. When the sealer hit the flock it flew everywhere and both ships look like the side of my car when the kids cut the grass while its still wet.

About 80 Vikings jumped out of their box from about 6'. This happened about 8 years ago and many of them still carry their battle wounds. Hope to heal em up before I die

I may be in the minority here, but I always read the label on a spray can before I use it.

If it's really "always", then you probably are in the minority.

It's human nature to glaze over common, repetitive tasks. Even when you have a "critical event", eventually you tend to fall back into "auto pilot" mode with such tasks.

Counter example, to this day SWMBO and I have a peculiarity when we get out of the car. The driver raises the keys over their head and says, "The keys are physically out of the car before I am closing the door." We started this habit closely shortly after our oldest started (proper) driving lessons. I think we still do this because we replaced an auto pilot ritual of checking the keys with the elaborate ritual described, which is now on auto pilot. In fact, both of us have both raised our hands and started speaking without the keys. Then we laugh. A little with. A little at.

It's the same thing with all the people who know not to cut toward your body, and instruct the young'unz so. A different kind of becoming overly comfortable, but a similar behavioural phenomenon.

I've never dropped a knife into my tender parts or grabbed the wrong spray can or dumped a box of miniatures, but I have (on two occasions) closed a container lid on a fully rigged sailing ship that was just a little bit taller than the depth of the box. Hard on the rigging, that.

Years ago when I was just getting into metal micro-armor I had no idea how to properly prep the figures. A "Friend" of mine said that I should just paint them the color I choose and then "Bake" the finish at 250 degrees F for 15 minutes.
Yep…you guessed it…ended up with a platoon micro-metal blobs!

Two tales of 1/1200 scale woe:

The Little Hurricane.
I bought 22x 1/1200 Napoleonic ships of the line at a flea market, assembled and painted and based. I wasn't perfectly happy with them and wanted to "fix" a number of things, so they went into a box to await their turn in the queue. One day, while moving things around in the shed, this box slid off the top of a stack and fell about 4 feet to land sideways on the floor. About half of the lead masts simply bent at the base from the side forces, many of the vessels suffered partial dismasting, and a few vessels popped off their bases and hurtled through the forest of masts to do extra damage. In just about one second, I had converted a playable collection of men-o-war into a box of wreckage.

The Twice Built Fleet
Five years ago, I launched a "quick project" to build about 5-6 dozen of the French and US vessels that existed at the end of the ACW in 1/1200 scale, for a whole "what if" war in Mexico. It really was a quick project (for once), despite all my added hyperdetailing: replaced masts (from Langton), added boats, wire davits, added anchors, rail-top hammock bundles, stacks drilled out or replaced with hand-constructed tubing (for addition of smoke), etc. In just a few months I went from zero to about half (enough for gaming) completely assembled and ready for paint. I waited for a warm day, then took them out to get primed…. and proceeded to stucco them all with a bad can of white primer. I didn't realize that there was an unpaintable texture forming until I was done spraying.

The next several months were a hell of experiments, trying to find stripping methods that would leave all my painstaking construction intact. Mostly that just increased the labor, and I ended up regluing nearly all of the vessels to some extent after stripping, and in some cases discarding the customized bits altogether (or losing a few down the drain). Along the way I caused some of the primer to turn into a brittle yellowish gummy adhesive layer that obscures details, which is why there is still an old kitchen pot in the shed with about a dozen unrecovered vessels inside.

- Ix

Went to dull coat about 100 15mm ACW figures to find as soon as I started spraying that I had picked up the can of gray primer instead…

"Lost" a stand of AWI figures. Couldn't figure out what happened until I accidentally stepped on them. Seems the cat swept them off the table and they ended up upside down with bayonets sticking into the gray carpeting. I couldn't see them in the carpeting because I have the habit of spraying the bottom of the bases with primer as well.

Have lost miscellaneous bits and pieces over the years even before assembly when things fell into the abyss.