Saturday 5 May 2012

Broken Resin Disaster!

Last night I pulled out the resin buildings I bought from Fieldworks at Salute with a view to bringing them up to standard before storing them with the rest of my 15mm terrain. But some time between when I photographed them a few days after the show and last night, the terraced building was broken. I say broken but that is a bit of an understatement. It was now in two large chunks with the centre section smashed to smithereens.

The model before its destruction


I don't know how it got broken but I'm assuming at some point it was knocked off my desk by someone in the house and they didn't realise the damaged caused. I'm not pointing fingers, it could have been anybody, and ultimately it's my fault for not storing these properly as soon as I got home. But to say I was upset by this turn of events would be untruthful!

After carefully collecting the pieces together (over 30 bits!) I painstakingly rebuilt the building using superglue. Thankfully the distressed look of the building is only enhanced by the new set of cracks and holes in the reconstructed model. I then reinforced the joins with some fast setting epoxy glue and some Tallus to look like rubble inside the building. It will need repainting but hopefully when its finished it will look OK.

I'm afraid I didn't take any pictures of the shattered model...I was in a state of extreme distress and it never occurred to me to photograph my misery for posterity! However I have learned an important lesson: Resin is fragile and needs to be store properly and promptly. I'll have to make a couple of tight fitting boxes for these models and pad them out with bubble wrap or styrene before putting them away in storage.

17 comments:

  1. Disaster! Hope your repair is barely noticeable.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Your a very patient man, I would have thrown a massive tantrum and smashed the thing up completely!!!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Well done that man; and wonderfully restraint of you not to have gone on the warpath! Must also apologise for a lack of comment posting recently, but would you believe your blog is blocked by my work's filtering system! No others just yours! I can only assume it is due to the change in address. It just means I have to remember to catch up at the weekend.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Maybe it's the Big Lee reference, after all you can't be to carful LOL

      Delete
  4. Me heart goes out to you. It reminds me of when my Mother took home my ECW army. Just put in the boot, the metal box just rolled and rolled. Hardly a figure still on it's base!!!! Took me weeks to even start to put it all back together

    Ian

    ReplyDelete
  5. Car body filler makes for a really strong join on resin Lee and can be textured while it's still workable.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Ouch! Painful experience. Lucky you were able to salvage it

    ReplyDelete
  7. Oh dear, I hope the repair goes okay

    ReplyDelete
  8. Oh no, sorry to hear that. Let's see some pictures of the final repair job once it's back together and painted. You can always say you customized it. If you need any spare packing I've got plenty of most types just give me shout rather than buying any, I can always drop some round.

    ReplyDelete
  9. At least most resins bond well with superglue, so you should have some nice and sturdy joins Big Lee.

    ReplyDelete
  10. Man, that's awful. I'm glad you were able to fix it, though!

    ReplyDelete
  11. I would have smashed it more with the tantrum and then started a witch hunt but then that's me!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I would probably have reacted the same way personally.

      Delete
  12. Nightmare! Fieldworks resin is really, really brittle. Good on you for persevering and fixing. I'm sure you'll be able to repaint to a higher standard that before.

    ReplyDelete
  13. Really annoying but it probably is better that it happened on "ruined" type buildings. That's one of the problem with resin though, when it snaps it can really break into pieces.

    ReplyDelete
  14. Blimey! Well done Lee ;)

    ReplyDelete
  15. Yeah that Fieldwork stuff is really brittle. I have a few pieces from them in my round to it file. Good effort to recover the broken piece and a lesson to be learned.

    ReplyDelete

Thank you for leaving a comment. I always try to reply as soon as I can, so why not pop back later and continue the conversation. In the meantime, check out my YouTube channel Miniature Adventures TV