Sniffing Glue

I started building models when I was ten. The first ones looked like they’d been hit by anti-aircraft guns. Parts of the sprue were left on, glue was applied too heavily, and I was too impatient to paint them properly. Then I played with them like toys which led to parts getting knocked off. They would usually end their existence flying into Mt. Everest, a.k.a. the brick wall in my back yard. Sometimes the plastic pilot even ejected to safety.


As I got older, my patience increased and I learned to enjoy the process of sitting at my workbench with tweezers and an airbrush to build some very detailed model airplanes. I started hanging them on nails over my closet. Working almost exclusively in the 1:48 scale when building aircraft was my medium. One inch on the model equaled 48 inches in real-life. I liked seeing how the different aircraft looked next to each other at the same scale.



In the middle of my room, hung with fishing line, a model of the B-1 swing-wing bomber flew under the ceiling light. I melted its left engines and hung a plume of cotton from wire out of the back of the aircraft. She was “hit” by a Russian Su-27 that was trailing behind her in the corner of my room.

Building models was calm and relaxing. On cold California winter nights I could sit and listen to the radio and paint details on missiles and dream of flying until early in the morning.

My mom would come up and make me open the window. Since I can’t smell, I couldn’t detect the paint and glue fumes in the room that were killing my brain cells. Maybe that’s why it was so relaxing.

Model building is a dying art. I hear mothers complaining about helping their kids make dioramas for school projects. The model aisle at Wal-mart is gone. They used to sell model paints, glues, kits, and supplies next to model rockets and rocket motors. Those are gone, possibly forever. I have to drive 40 minutes to go to a store that sells model kits now. I wonder what caused that shift in the market. Are fathers too busy to build with their children? Have video games overstimulated children to the point that they can’t sit and enjoy a long and detailed project?

It is twenty-five years since I built my first models. My next door neighbor Brent, had a father who built hundreds of model airplanes that covered his bedroom walls. That is probably what made me want to build my first one. My dad helped me paint the first jet I hung over the closet. It was the same color as the blue on my wall. Actually, it was painted with the leftover paint from that room.

I bought some models for my kids to build with me in the garage. The winters in Utah are colder, but even when it is snowing outside, the garage heater makes painting possible. Now it is my wife who makes me open a window.

My kids had a blast. Carrie built an F4 Corsair, Chris build a model of the WWII USS Enterprise with a deck of wildcat warplanes, and Coleman built a model of the P-51 Mustang. We listened to the Triology station on Pandora Internet radio and talked and put things together. I didn’t get much done on the USS Kitty Hawk aircraft carrier I was building. Instead, I cleaned up the occasional paint spill and helped my younger son understand how to put his fuselage together.

We worked on the models all afternoon. When bedtime rolled around, they couldn’t believe it was 8:30 already. The day passed quickly. They left their projects on the workbench in the garage to dry. When I got up on Sunday morning, the boys projects were already in the kitchen. The first thing they did in the morning was bring them inside.

I flash back to memories with my parents from time to time. I remember sitting at the kitchen table when I was a boy, working on my first model with my dad. I wonder if my kids will remember a scene from last night in twenty-five years. I wonder if there will be a company manufacturing models for my grand kids to build. And I wonder how many brain cells this hobby has cost me.