When To Admit Defeat

When does one admit defeat? I have a hard time knowing when to stop fighting a given kit and save myself a lot of trouble by throwing it into the trash can. Sometimes I must resemble Captain Ahab just a little, snarled in the ropes and old harpoons on flank of Moby Dick, stabbing away as I go down with the whale. Okay, that's a little dramatic, but you know what I mean. Maybe it's pride - boasting "I can redeem this mess; I have the skill and I have the super glue." Maybe it's stupidity.

I have two models on my bench at the moment that are starting to resemble Moby Dick. One is a Hasegawa 1/72nd scale Grant medium tank; the other is a Hasegawa 1/72nd scale Churchill I infantry tank. They've been in my garage for years (they actually got lost behind the ramps we use to change oil in our cars). I got them out and glued them together while watching TV the other day. Hasegawa's older armor kits aren't great, but I kind of like them - at least they're cheap.

The Grant has sand shields, a common fitting in British service, so that means you have to sort of paint the undercarriage and tracks before installing the sand shields. I thought I would do the Churchill's tracks at the same time. Only now, the tracks are disintegrating. It seems that every morning, I go out to the workbench and find that the tracks have broken in a new spot. So I super-glue the broken tracks to the various wheels anew, touch up the paint, and the cycle repeats over and over. The Grant's tracks are largely hidden by the sand shields, but the Churchill had no fenders and the whole top run of track is clearly visible, and the more I glue and fret and snarl, the worse it all gets.

There are other things in my life, you know. Well, other models, anyway. Nicer models. Models whose tracks are not likely to break, or which don't have tracks at all. I have all the AMT 1/2500 Enterprises, for example, and they look like great fun. I have a Romulan cruiser (the double-decker, the "bivalve cruiser" as I call it) poised on the edge of being done. I always thought the Mirage F1 was a particularly sexy jet fighter, and I have several of them I could be working on.

But no, I'm spending all my time gluing broken fragments of tracks back together. Soon I'll be using an electron microscope to glue broken molecules of track back together, all to salvage a couple of tank models that weren't all that good even in the first place.

I draw back, harpoon in hand, ready to plunge it home even as the great white whale begins to sink beneath the waves.