Don't You Hate It When..

[Clay]

You have the piece you need in your hand, and then you drop it? Well it just happened to me, I dropped the headlights to my Challenger build. I was digging through the box , found three of them then the box I set them on fell over, I found them again, then the box fell over again, I still am missing 1 of the 3 I found and another I haven't seen yet.

[Clay]

Ok all is well, I have found the head lights.

[Raul_Perez]

Yeah, but what's worse is when you have a small part in the tweezers and it goes flying off to no one knows where...then you're really screwed, because of course, it was your only or last one...

[Clay]

or you break a part getting off the tree? I really hate that.

[dub]

Oh, that's why I keep a flashlight or two near the bench. My carpet is light gray. Perfect for light gray unpainted styrene parts to blend in with..... grrrr! The light helps with contrast to see things a little differently. Little chrome or metal parts will glisten a bit to help to see them. I usually don't give up and I have a near 100% recovery rate so far. (fingers crossed...)

[Raul_Perez]

  jones_clayton said:

or you break a part getting off the tree? I really hate that.

Just wait until you start playing with the PE stuff... There isn't anyone on this board that's used PE parts and hasn't seen one of them go zinging off of the tweezers, never to be seen by human eyes again...

[marinewifejones]

  Raul_Perez said:

Just wait until you start playing with the PE stuff... There isn't anyone on this board that's used PE parts and hasn't seen one of them go zinging off of the tweezers, never to be seen by human eyes again...

just let David (the little monster) loose in the room and watch for hand to mouth movement and I promise you will find even the smalles item lost.

[JoshaWaRX]

I just had one of my front shocks fall from my tweezers. After a very extensive search, I discovered that the shock has actually fallen into the printer sitting under my desk.

[bobss396]

I go through that all too often. I'll lose a part in a matter of a few minutes, I haven't moved off the chair and the part is nowhere to be found. I look in my pants cuffs, in my shoes, shake out my clothes in an open area. Just like some little gremlin came in and took it on me.

Years back I lost a steering wheel to a '59 Chevy in my kitchen, looked under and behind EVERYTHING using a flashlight. I had one from a '58 Chevy that I used instead. A steering wheel is pretty big, hard to lose. Of course it was all painted up.

A few months later I was remodeling the kitchen and remembered about the steering wheel. I had to take the radiator out in the process, was sure it HAD to be behind it somewhere. I took it apart surgically, NO steering wheel was to be found. File that away with Jimmy Hoffa and Amelia Airheart.

Bob

[bobss396]

  Raul_Perez said:

Yeah, but what's worse is when you have a small part in the tweezers and it goes flying off to no one knows where...then you're really screwed, because of course, it was your only or last one...

Oh yeah, tweezers, aka parts launchers. PING! I used to wonder why the photo etched sheets came with SO MANY parts on them, figured I was getting a GREAT deal. When you've lost the 3rd part in a row, you look at the dwindling number of parts left and re-think your handling process.

Bob

[bobss396]

  dub said:

Oh, that's why I keep a flashlight or two near the bench. My carpet is light gray. Perfect for light gray unpainted styrene parts to blend in with..... grrrr! The light helps with contrast to see things a little differently. Little chrome or metal parts will glisten a bit to help to see them. I usually don't give up and I have a near 100% recovery rate so far. (fingers crossed...)

I used to have better luck finding parts on my green didning room rug, they stood out pretty well. Now I'm working on a ceramic tile floor and whatever gets dropped takes a bounce into another dimension. When I do find something by freak chance only, it'll be 12 feet away on the carpeted area of the room.

I do have a spare floursecent light fixture that I am some day going to install under the table to aid the recovery process.

Bob

[Blue coyote]

  bobss396 said:

I do have a spare floursecent light fixture that I am some day going to install under the table to aid the recovery process.

Now THAT'S dedication!

[Robert Myers]

I have an excellent method for finding dropped parts! I sit very still in my chair and look around me. I don't see the part...so I slowly roll my chair back so I can get up and look. Something goes crunch under the chair wheel. FOUND THE PART! just hate that

[evilone]

heres what happened to me i was outside painting my 65 licoln(35$ PAINT JOB)

then WHAMO a sudden wind storm comes out of nowhere (BENIFITS OF LIVING IN CALIFORNIA)

parts fly everywhere (in the dirt,grass,and bushes)

i found everything but my steering wheel (all paint was dry thank god)

so i figure its in the dirt (yah right it is)

all of a sudden i walk very slowly

and crunch

there it is on the bricks flattened

heres what i was thinking (god dam@ mother fu@#$% nature your a f^&*!@ b@#$% right now i hope you rot in hell)

thank god for my extra parts box

[Junkman]

I'm so relieved. I always thought this only happens to me!

Edited March 12, 2008 by Junkman

[Olle F]

I work in the basement/garage, which has a concrete floor that I painted white just because it's (in theory anyway) is much easier to spot the parts you drop on it. Still, I dropped a valve cover for my Chrysler 300c on the floor about a year ago, and was never able to find it again. You wouldn't think that a tiny plastic part that falls about 2 feet would have enough kinetic energy to bounce right into the twilight zone, but this one seems to have done just that. I also lost a whole bag of Evergreen styrene strips several months ago, and I still don't know where it is...

I have lost so many parts through the years that I have developed a system that's almost fool proof. Every time I cut something off the sprue, I put it in a small ziploc bag (like the small, jewelry kind baggies you can find in the hobby stores) and put it in the box. If I'm working on the parts, I drill a small hole in them and stick a pin in them, or super glue them to a piece of sprue to create a "handle". If the parts are too small to do that (lenses, PE parts etc), I simply put them on a piece of tape. It still happens that parts manage to escape though, but I guess that's just an inevitable part of a modeler's life.

[Clay]

I hate when parts come off the tree themselves and get behind the folds of the boxes

[Raul_Perez]

  jones_clayton said:

I hate when parts come off the tree themselves and get behind the folds of the boxes

Be happy that the part is still in the box...

[Clay]

I hate it when I have a nicely painted body and then all of a sudden it hits the concrete.

And I hate it when I have a piece of bare metal in my hand and then I drop it.

[evilone]

i hate it when im wokin on a model and the neighbors come over to play my ps3

i hate it when i get to cutting plastic and the dremal slips

i hate it when the model dosent want to go together

###### i hate it when the winds come out of nowhere

these r just a few things at the top of my list

[Billy Kingsley]

I've had two bizarre happenings like this in the past few years. Back around 2000, when I was just getting into building, I was going on AMT's new tool 58 Edsel. It was going along nicely, when all of a sudden one of my wheel axle/attachment points just falls right off the table. Looked and looked, even moved everything in the area...There's not a single space I didn't check, and I've gone over that area thousands of thousands of times.

I never found that part! Luckily, someone on the ModelCarList sent me a spare one...unfortunatly time has clouded my memory of who.

The other, happened earlier this year. Now, whenever I clean and take down my table I loose stuff, and in January of this year I took it down so I could sort and document my 1/64 street car collection. When I set it back up at the end of January, I discovered I lost the hood for my 1/64 2007 Clint Bowyer car! It had already been painted, and was waiting for decals. (I've since finished the rest of the car). It took one of the alligator clips I use with it!!

I've looked everywhere I can think of, and I can't find it.

I've lost some headlights too but who hasn't? The good thing about that is that everytime I've lost a headlight, I've been lucky enough to already have replacements in the parts box!

Edited March 20, 2008 by Billy Kingsley

[Clay]

I hate it when I get a model for a specific reason and cant remember where it is.

[Raul_Perez]

  jones_clayton said:

I hate it when I get a model for a specific reason and cant remember where it is.

I do that all the time!! It's part of getting old!!

[samdiego]

I haven't vacuumed in a month because I can't find a lense for my Fairlane.

I hate it when you are precisely super-glueing two parts together only to end up with 1 part glued to a finger and 1 part glued to your thumb.

Edited April 5, 2008 by samdiego

[Clay]

  Raul_Perez said:

I do that all the time!! It's part of getting old!!

I did that with the cobra you sent me, I have no idea where it went. I think Ani is playing an April Fool's Day joke on me and forgot about it.

I'm too young to be getting old though I feel it hitting about twice as hard as a regular person would.

  samdiego said:

I haven't vacuumed in a month because I can't find a lense for my Fairlane.

I hate it when you are precisely super-glueing two parts together only to end up with 1 part glued to each finger.

Happens to me all the time, I usually superglue bigger pieces together then my finger gets in the glue, then it gets stuck the piece I am gluing