With the arrival of the clear styrene, I turned my attention and effort back to finally getting the landing light covers done.

I needed to cut a piece of styrene that would fit and to do that I needed a template. I decided to use the sticky strip of a Post-It pad that I cut to cover the opening and wrap around the wing. Needing to determine the dimension of the opening, I held the wing up to the light and traced the lighter shape of the opening:

With the shape I needed outlined, I cut the paper, tacked it down to the styrene, and traced the shape I needed to cut out:

I taped one end in place and then used a hair drier to heat the plastic so that I could bend it around the wing. But once I took the tape off, I discovered that bending styrene caused the curved section to fog, which is not what I want:

Okay, so I repeated the process on butyrate:

And THEN I dropped the sodding model and snapped off the shaft the propeller was supposed to slide over:

Not AT ALL pleased with myself, I figured, “Okay…I can fix this.” And then I noticed that the hair drier, though it did a good job at heating the butyrate landing light cover, also did a FINE job of deforming the collar and shroud of one of the guns:

Well. My head didn’t exactly explode, but my reaction was…well…bad. Very bad. Ears ringing, nose running, earwax melting, eyes narrowing, claws extending, BAD.

Perhaps not obvious in these posts is the fact that this build has (as much as an inanimate object can) fought me every step of the way. Well, okay…I like a challenge. And then there’s this thing called “erosion.” Erosion operates very slowly and is rarely evident until whatever is being eroded is gone. And looking at that deformed gun mount brought to my attention the fact that my enjoyment found in surmounting challenges and difficulties had eroded away.

This isn’t my job. I’m not getting paid for doing this. It’s supposed to be enjoyable (the grown-up word for “fun”). I am NOT ENJOYING THIS ANYMORE. So I’m going to do something that I’ve never done before. I am stopping this build before finishing it. It’s getting boxed up and put on the shelf. If I don’t do this I am going to take a hammer to this thing and reduce it to a pile of plastic and resin (with a little butyrate) fragments.

The best part of being good is knowing when to quit. Perhaps I’ll come back to this ANNOYING build at a later date but for today I am done.

DONE.

 Time to go put things away, clean the shop, and decide what I’m going to build next.