Your most embarrassing mistakes when building model kits?

[Weaver]

Glued together a PM Messerschmitt P.1111 fuselage and then realised I hadn't put any nose weight in. Fortunately it's a pretty basic kit with no cockpit front bulkhead, so I was able to rectify the situation by spending several hours dipping individual bits of "Fluid Steel" (Like Liquid Gravity but coarser) in PVA, then rolling them into the footwells and shaking them down to the nose.


Then there was that bloody Skyvan...

Disaster 1: glued the two eleven-piece wings together, then managed to knock an entire bottle of liquid poly over both of them. Both utterly beyond repair. Luckily, I had a spare set of wings from another Skyvan that I'd started, but never finished, converting to a helicopter, so the day was saved, but any other plans for the spare wings went in the bin.

Disaster 2: I filled the interior with cargo and baggage, making sure that all the white metal bits were in front of the wheels and all the plastic ones behind them. Confident that this would prevent it being a tail-sitter, I glued the fuselage together without any ballast... and it was a tail-sitter. Also, for some reason I can't remember, I'd put an extra central wall into the space under the cockpit floor where the ballast goes, so I had to drill TWO holes in the underside  to pour Liquid Gravity in through. Luckily I found a whiffjitsu excuse for the holes: the aircraft was going to belong to the Britsh Antarctic Survey, and I read that one of the Twotters they use in real life is fitted with survey gear, so I got two black discs (from googly eyes IIRC), stuck them over the holes, and claimed them as Geomagnetic Survey Sensors.

Disaster 3: I carefully masked all the windows with a new (to me) brand of liquid masking fluid, then sprayed the whole thing International Orange. Came to peel the masking fluid off, and the paint had spider-webbed under every pane of every window,, badly. I managed to get a replacement set of transparencies from Airfix, but then problem then was how to fit them, because the cabin side windows have a top-hat profile and fit from the inside. I had to push each one out of it's frame, into the interior which, you'll recall, I'd carefully filled with a mass of complicated cargo, and hope that I could shake it out of the tail ramp without it getting stuck. Then I had to trim the lip off each new side window and fix it in from the outside VERY CAREFULLY, because if it fell inside with wet PVA on it, there wasn't a chance it hell of it ever shaking out of the back.

Amazingly, the model still came out really well, and despite being carried to numerous shows, not one of the barely supported side windows has ever popped out/in.

[kerick]

I sprayed grey on a Monogram 1/48th Skyraider not realizing I had not covered the cockpit in any way. Out came the firecrackers!

[killnoizer]

I guess mine would have been gluing the canopy on a Monogram Bearcat and leaving the masking tape that protected the instrument panel's coaming in place... 
Obviously, i only noticed it when i removed the canopy masks when i finished the build so, instead of a black coaming, it's a pretty Tamiya masking tape yellow one...
Also painting navigation lights in the wrong sides(green where the red should be and vice-versa) but i guess that these are small.
The one that hurt me the most was picking up a model on which i'd used Tamiya spray can flat clear that seemed to by dry enough to handle but it wasn't fully dry yet... left a finger print on the top of the fuselage which went all the way through the paint to the plastic...   it could've been worse and more noticeable but it was on a build that i was really happy about till that happened and it was enough to get me very disappointed and to use every swear word in the book for quite a few minutes...

Almost forgot, i did melt some stuff, not with hot water or thinner but with putty. I thought it was harmless stuff so i dabbed a ton of it onto a 1/72 revell F-16's main gear doors to create a wider main landing gear for my first F-16W build... Needless to say, it melted the styrene... i did manage to use it... and that was how i learned the true meaning of PSR...

I have build a engine out of a rocket body with a sidewinder combined Inside the tube, want to fix it with standard glue . And more glue . More more ... And many more glue, that small fuzzy bunny of piece would not stay in the Center ! 
I pull it out , creamy plastic comes with it .  Decided to put some putty inside and start again, seems working fine .  Stays in place , okay .  Placed it at the ,,drying station ,, , a very warm place on a machine, compressor in the work shop .... After hours coming back and found the complete engine are soft like rubber , c o m p l e t e    s o f t  .   
Waiting two days now , hope it will be hard again some day .

Started to use 2K repair putty that day on Modells for that kind of work immediately, I got a piece in spare which I have used to fix the top of the gear shifter in a  1:1 sized Land Rover six years ago , works perfect, strong like metal . But it smells like the pure hell when working with , absolutely dangerous in rooms 

[Pellson]

Land Rover - making mechanics out of ordinary men since 1948.. 

[Rick Lowe]

I had decanted some spraycan primer into a 35mm film cannister.
Placed it on the workbench, near the windscreen of my Mad Max Coupe that I'd waited a long time for.
Heard a 'pop' and realized I hadn't let the paint outgas. Spotted windscreen.
Out came a brush loaded with the paint cleaner I was using at the time.
Who'd have thought Xylene would attack plastic that thoroughly? Apparently everyone except me...    
A few choice words were uttered.
Out came some acrylic sheet from a shirt box, and the superglue.
The fogging? Road Grime, dammit!

Still, I was happy and it eventually won a place in the club competition... not that there were many entries in that category, but I'll take what I can get...

[Wardukw]

I've done alot of the stuff mentioned here and some which haven't..like knocking over brand new bottle of Tamiya extra thin glue..brand new paint..saying to a friend how good I am using my model knife then stabbing the knife into my left thumb 👍.
Spending hrs painting which quite possibly the best pilot figure I've ever painted and then gluing the canopy in place and only remembering the next day I'd forgotten to put the pilot in this A-4.
Putting wing struts on backwards..landing gear which should lean forward now face backwards and once removed never looks right again on a 32nd ME109.

[AeroplaneDriver]

Been there done all of that I think. It's part of the "joy" of modeling! 

[Wardukw]

Been there done all of that I think. It's part of the "joy" of modeling! 

Couldn't agree more 

[Nigel Bunker]

I had converted a Revell 1/32 F-4F into a RAAF F-4E, painted it, printed the decals and all it needed was a coat of satin varnish. I took it out to the garage, grabbed the aerosol off of the shelf and started spraying the varnish, only to see all my work on the port wing disappeasring under a coat of grey paint as I'd picked up the wrong aerosol. Oh well, once bitten.....

[AeroplaneDriver]

I had converted a Revell 1/32 F-4F into a RAAF F-4E, painted it, printed the decals and all it needed was a coat of satin varnish. I took it out to the garage, grabbed the aerosol off of the shelf and started spraying the varnish, only to see all my work on the port wing disappeasring under a coat of grey paint as I'd picked up the wrong aerosol. Oh well, once bitten....

This is a phobia of mine.  I never spray a rattlecan without checking the label an OCD appropriate 4-5 times. 

[sandiego89]

I think I have done most of the above, especially the comprehensive list by The Ray, but two that stick out to me:

- forgetting to glue in windows that must be glued in from the inside before mating, gluing and painting the fuselage pieces together.  But hasn't happened since, well 2 weeks ago. 

- Painting a upper/lower surface the wrong color before assembly because I can't picture if it is top or bottom before I goes together- done this many times

[Rick Lowe]

I like the "OCD Appropriate" tag...   

And as we all know, it ought to be 'CDO' - because then the letters are in correct Alphabetical order, as they should be!

[McColm]

Never do any whiffery when you can't get back to sleep. I have ruined several builds.

Don't skip the instructions apart from those printed in Mach 2 kits.

Make sure that you have enough paint to cover your build, sometimes through an accident this is a blessing in disguise but experience has taught me thin coats are better than one thick one.

I would say research your subject but in my case I like to kitbash if only I knew from the start what it's going to look like when finished .

[zenrat]

Don't research your subject.  It will lead to procrastination and indecision.  Just make it all up.