Frustration!

I was hoping to get a good few hours of modelling in today...

Anne is away racing sidecars in South Wales, and apart from a couple of hours over lunch to visit some bee-keeping friends, I was expecting a day of peace and quiet to finally knock a couple of things off.  However I didn't anticipate the modelling bug striking my ten year old stepson so hard today.  A friend of ours gave him an old Tamiya kit for a Ducati 916 (the same bike that I have).  

So I've spent most of the morning and afternoon holding parts, cutting out components, and generally being a gopher!  Pretty much all of it he can do himself, but he does like the company :-)

Anyway, I'm not really complaining.  He's shown a skill and patience level far beyond what I was expecting.  This is the result so far:

It's about five inches long, and has exactly the same components as the real thing, so he's had me going "that's a crankcase breather, that's a steering damper" and so on...

For me, I was frustrated because:

(1) I forgot that I'd switched my mini-drill into reverse to do some burnishing, so the small drills I was using to make holes for handrail knobs on my J15 were going nowhere, and particularly after I snapped the drills...

(2) Whilst spraying track for my demo board, the paint well fell off the side of my airbrush, so that was a clearing up job...

(3) I took the Pug back out of its box where I put it for the loctite on the gearwheel to set, and found that I hadn't re-done as much to it as I thought.

Oh well, in reality, it's been a lovely day!  Hope that yours was as well...

East Suffolk Light

Over the weekend we visited Snape Maltings, in search of antiques shops.  Whilst driving around the area, and seeing the maltings itself, it reminded me so much of Iain Rice's East Suffolk Light Railway.

Many people talk about the influence of Pendon or Heckmondwike on their modelling, but for me the key influence was the ESLR.  That combination of artistic observation, eclectic rolling stock, and a history that bound it all together was superb in setting a time and a place.  It wasn't just a model railway, but a model *of* a railway, even if that was an entire fiction :-)

It would be great to know "where is it now?" and whether it was ever going to appear on the exhibition circuit again, but it simply seems to have sunk without trace.  Ah well, I think that I'll be digging out my old magazines for a dose of nostalgia tonight...