One thing is the awful persistence of the smell of superglue. It's really not a good idea to spend too long inhaling the stuff. I finished up my gluing about two hours ago and it's still all I can smell. And since I have a cold in my head which is preventing me from smelling anything very much.... Yes, I'm sure I had far more of the fumes than is healthy.
Well, maybe there wasn't an option. I was sticking together various science fiction tanks and there's no useful alternative to superglue. Epoxy smells worse and takes longer to set, so that you're breathing in the fumes for hours as you mix little mini batches for each successive sticking task. Soldering is what the big boys recommend, but I hate to think of how much I could hurt myself doing that. So it's out with the gap filling superglue and the zapagap, which smells worse than the superglue, and try to get the whole job done in one go so that at least it isn't hanging over me for weeks.
All the way through the job, I was thinkng that I shouldn't be doing it. There are still 23 Mongol horsemen sitting on my painting table looking reproachful. Until I paint them, I don't have clear space to start into anything else, so why was I gluing together the new stuff?
Because it was new stuff. It had just arrived in the post and it needed to be stuck together before I could even figure out what it would look like. And this is how it comes to pass that every wargamer has a backlog of unpainted figures; there's always something you think you'd like to try, and picking out figures and buying them is much quicker and easier than cleaning them up, priming them, painting them and basing them.
I've had the Mongols for four years without painting them. They were bought when I was doing a lot of Ancients in Israel and it seemed to me that you could never have too many nomadic light horse. Then I came back to Dublin, the group here weren't into Ancients at the time and the Mongols got long fingered. No immediate pay off in painting them. They only came out of the shipping box late last year, and then they sat disconsolately on top of my painting shelf for a year, stuck to their lollipop sticks and undercoated, but otherwise neglected. I was doing other stuff - scanning in ten years worth of negatives, rebasing three thousand 6mm tanks, housekeeping of one kind and another.
But the housekeeping finally came to an end this autumn and I started half heartedly back into the Mongols - still a pointless group of figures which would gather just as much dust painted as they already had unpainted, but equally, still a reproach sitting there reminding me that I had spent money on them and I ought to do something with it. And I got 90 or so done, but temptation is always beckoning. A month or so ago GZG had a sale, and I was briefly tempted by some of their new SF tanks - they were just so weird and interesting looking that I wanted some even without having any particular idea of what they'd be any good for. Then I looked at the Mongols and reviewed what had to be done after them and forgot about the idea. Then I looked again at GZG, and they had a Christmas offer. And this time I bit.
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