My 24-hour build experience

The 24-hour group build on Facebook is over, and I’m sorry to report that I didn’t finish my Monogram 1/72 A-1E Skyraider.Time got away from me, despite working on it until 2 am Saturday night. I spent about 14 hours in total, which was almost sufficient to build the model in its entirety. If I had allocated another two hours, I think the model would be complete.

Here’s my after-action report.

What worked in my favor

Despite not finishing the Skyraider, I still think it was a good choice. As I wrote earlier this week, it has very few colors, making painting relatively quick and easy. And luckily I didn’t have to do any touchups.

Pre-planning was very helpful, and I should do this more often. For example, I made sure that when I painted black, I painted the interior, wheels, and prop.

I followed some of my own advice for building models faster, which I’ve written about over the last few years. I painted the interior black, didn’t spend much time on the underside, and didn’t obsess over minor seams.

Finally, I didn’t add much detail. The cockpit is a massive black void of nothingness, but detailing it would’ve sent me down a wormhole of lost time. I thought about replacing the exhaust stubs with brass tubing, but that, too, would’ve cost precious time. I did, however, replace the pitot tube (?) on the vertical stabilizer with telescoping tubing.

What worked against me

The Monogram A-1E features raised panel lines, which I knew I wanted to rescribe. Even though there are minimal panel lines, the task was more time-consuming than I’d expected. And I skipped rescribing the lines on the underside!

Even though there weren’t many colors on the model, I’m fastidious when it comes to cleaning my airbrush. Each airbrushing session is followed by a cleaning, and that was a time suck. I probably spent the equivalent of an hour doing just that.

I underestimated the time required to mask the Skyraider’s canopy. Tedious to be sure! That said, I was very happy with the outcome, a reminder that canopy masking need not be as frightening as always anticipate.

I didn’t  finish the Skyraider, but I’m okay with that. As I told a friend on Saturday, despite the goal of finishing a model in 24 hours, I didn’t want to sacrifice quality. I’d rather stop where I did, take a breather, and wrap up the final tasks over the next week. As I said earlier today, the best part of the experience was simply spending an extended amount of time at the workbench doing what I enjoy most.

The same group of guys has already schedule next year’s 24-hour build, though it appears to be intended only for car modelers. If you’re interested, you can join their Facebook group.

Here are links to my earlier articles about building models more quickly.

5 ways to increase your output
Paint it black and close it up