Share your &*@%$!!! Hobby Moments

[Plynkes]

Wow, that must have been weird.




My favourite one is that time I accidentally emasculated a Masai warrior with my craft knife.

Worry not, the story has a happy ending: I made him a new, bigger John Thomas out of green stuff.

[JollyBob]

Wow, dadlamassu, that must have been a really creepy moment... 

I think my best was dropping an x-acto knife while prepping a figure, automatically grabbing for it, gripping the blade, screaming, letting go and catching it point down in my knee.

The worst thing was I couldn't get down out of the loft without leaving blood splatters everywhere so not only was I bandaged like a mummy, I had a proper telling off from my wife.

[Hammers]

Wow, dadlamassu, that must have been a really creepy moment... 

I think my best was dropping an x-acto knife while prepping a figure, automatically grabbing for it, gripping the blade, screaming, letting go and catching it point down in my knee.

The worst thing was I couldn't get down out of the loft without leaving blood splatters everywhere so not only was I bandaged like a mummy, I had a proper telling off from my wife.

It is a very manly sport, wargaming.

[Diablo Jon]

Walked into my games room the other day to a scene of destruction....the glass door of a detolf cabinet had decided to shatter into a million pieces. 

Bit of a mystery...was a cabinet I’d had for years, nothing had fallen against it, no big temperature changes etc

More of an inconvenience than anything...the upper shelves each had 100 figures on them, all of which had been dusted with tiny flakes of glass, and needed careful cleaning...still finding small pieces a good 6’ from the cabinet.



No miniatures were harmed in the taking of this photo.

Holy crap that would annoy me. Glad your stuff survived unscathed. I wouldn't bet against you finding bits of hidden glass in your gaming space for years, Are those IKEA display cases they look a lot like mine?

[DintheDin]

Ouch! The glass damage was a real catastrophy! And the prole is little pieces that fell on uneven surfaces...
Anyway, I found this
BEST way to pick up broken glass

[Hammers]

Ouch! The glass damage was a real catastrophy! And the prole is little pieces that fell on uneven surfaces...
Anyway, I found this
BEST way to pick up broken glass

That guy, when he's done cutting up his fingers, should proceed to scrubbing that filthy oven of his. 

[tin shed gamer]

So, so many .

Done exactly the same as Paul. Plus undercoated one off sculpts with the undercoat turing to a pebble dash on the most detailed area of the sculpt.
The biggest in terms damage and loss. Was  winter 2018-19 I didn't use my workshop forpretty much the entire winter. As I working on a museum display .Opened up in February to find I'd had a leaking roof . Which killed an entire book case full of reference book's( which wasn't that much of inconvenience when I was honest with my self as it dawned on me I hadn't touched a single one of them in years.)
Mildew had entirely claimed all but four of my mdf buildings.
Only two of my ww2 buildings survived. One I couldn't get the smell out of.(That went to Ewan to either save or bin.) The other the church totally unscathed and free of pong.
Roman temple had a fine green mold inside and out But cleaned up with no effort. Plus a Row of shops that appeared unscathed( until a couple of days ago when I used it for a comparison photo. The interior has merrily gone green.)
None of my card builds had any signs of any damage at all. So the rebuild began with cardboard and I'm ending up with an interesting look to my 1930's town buildings with quite a unique feel .
So I'm classing it as a win. As for Rome well its well and truly fallen as I've no mojo for ancients( or spare cash    )
The most wounding . Was my Swan ship.
It was one of my first models It went to live at Grand Manner.( getting the promised two castings which was part of the deal was a lenghty process . In the end I only got the one copy and that took over two years to get.)
So I quite enjoyed building and painting it. Once it was done I put it out the reach of the kids to dry.
On top of the fish tank in the kitchen well over 5ft off the ground. Left it there over night. In fact it was still there the next evening. Just not looking liked I'd left it. Rather than the twelve parts I'd made and glued together . I now had 38 parts that required re assembly.
Apparently Swan ships don't fly nor do they get on well with the flex of a hair dryer. Especially when for reasons unkown to mankind you decide to get ready for a girls night out in the kitchen and wander across the kitchen drying your hair.
Rebuilt and remodeled it . Although I had been apologetically handed a 38 piece puzzle. Turns out it was in fact at least a 43 piece puzzle hense the strategically placed shields and sea base.

Again I class it as a Win because it motivated me to have a dedicated hobby space.

[Pijlie]

There was the time I took a swig from my painting water, in those days when I rinsed my brushes in approximately the same kind of mug as my coffee was in.

Even more painful was rinsing my brush in my tumbler of Highland Park...

Really traumatic was spraypainting a 1/48 Tiger Moth with an apparently un- or not-well-enough-shaken spraycan, covering the entire model in a gravel-like substance which, due to the high pigment-to-medium ratio, almost immediately dried to a rock-hard substance, completely impervious to any paint-stripper I dared to apply to it. 

And of course there was that Reaper Bones dragon that, although through no fault of mine, was too large for the material it was made of and overnight drooped forward so much that I found it with its nose and wingtips touching the ground, looking really depressed about the fact that it wasn't made of tin....

Reaching into the Grand Fleet box and impaling my thumb on the steel wire mast of HMS Inflexible wasn't a party either, although sufficiently ironic after the pain had subsided.

[Baron von Wreckedoften]

Never injured myself on the modelling side of things, but here is the closest I've ever come to crying at the wargaming table.....

I was marginally involved with the play-testing of the AWI rule set British Grenadier, back in the early 2000s, which - despite the travails set out below, I still think is the best set of AWI rules I've come across in almost 50 years of wargaming.  My problem is that, whenever I'm the British, I just cannot get them to charge home, and especially not when using the "bayonet charge" rule.  I have charged home with Germans, Americans (both sides) and even militia (both sides), but British Regulars?  Nope.  And especially not "elites".

Worst two examples - a refight of Bunker Hill in which every one of the 11 (that's ELEVEN) charges by British troops failed to either (a) pass the initial morale test to commence the charge, (b) failed to roll high enough on the movement dice to actually reach the enemy, or (c) failed the morale test to charge home.  In the end, I had to stand off and shoot the enemy to bits. 

The other was a refight of Brandywine, where I ended up (after what, if I say so myself, was a pretty cool manoeuvre) with both battalions of Grenadiers and a squadron of Light Dragoons ready to charge militia on 3DPs - the most dismal troops and morale status you can have under these rules - in the back.  Not only that, but the result of such a one-sided melee would have seen said militia rout into the back of a brigade of Continentals, and then them into the back of another brigade of Continentals.  The first Grenadier battalion refused to charge; the second passed the initial morale test, but then threw 2,2 with the two movement DAv, fell two inches short, and shuddered to a halt.  My last hope, the Light Dragoons, threw the correct movement dice, but failed the "to charge home" test so badly that they had to retreat 10".  Guess who was only 9" from the table edge and routed off table never to be seen again?

About 2 or 3 years ago, we had another AWI game.  Feeling sorry for me, and knowing my 10-year run of failure at getting British troops to charge home, the other players had secretly agreed among themselves that if I attempted to charge using British troops, they would offer to let me use some of their dice which, unbeknown to me, were "loaded" and would roll 6s.  About half-way through the game, the big moment arrived and one of them said, "Here, use these dice, they've been rolling ok for us all game."  My first three rolls with them were 1,1 1,2 and 1,1; at which point everyone burst out laughing.  They eventually told me that I had once again defied the odds.  Unfortunately, things were not going well in other aspects of my life and this was the last straw - I went and sat on a bench outside the hall for about an hour, mainly to avoid the urge to crush all my figures! 

And that was the day I officially became "The worst dice roller in the club".

[Muzfish4]

Years ago, when living at home I had trouble getting the gaffer tape (or whatever it is) off a can of Dullcote that secured the lid of the spray can to the body. Younger me used a knife to cut it, intending to just cut through the tape only but cut a bit low and a bit deep and punctured the can.

Great way to empty a can really quickly. Fortunately the puncture was pointed at a wall at the time and I could drop the rapidly depressurising tin in a wastepaper basket. I lost several t-shirts that day wiping down walls quickly before the varnish set or my folly was discovered.

To prove I learn from experience, much later on, in a share house I was squeezing away at a blocked bottle of Vallejo paint and, instead of cleaning the nozzle of the bottle I just kept absent mindedly squeezing away until the nozzle bit was pushed off and Deck Tan was sprayed over the miniature, table and curtains next to the window where I was painting. Got most of it cleaned up quickly and the curtains into soak in the laundry tub within minutes. Made a virtue of necessity and put all the curtain in the place through the washing machine. My sudden domesticness (not a word) attracted favourable but surprised comments from housemates of the time.

So, definite non-pro tip: spray cans and sharp blades don't go together and if something doesn't seem to work the way it should doing the same thing, but harder, is not the best option. Who knew?!? 

[Unlucky General]

As a general rule of wargaming life, I can eventually come to forgive myself for dropping models/figures and busting them. I DON'T LIKE IT ... but I can learn to forgive it. BUT ... a fellow gamer dropping my shit and busting it should be gut-shot by a disintegrater ray-gun. But there was one exception ...

I have many model aircraft but no Spitfire. This is becasue when I did make a Spitfire some 20 years ago (and I liked how it turned out) I soon saw it transported down the hallway in the mouth of Boudicca - my tri-colour Basset hound bitch. I loved that dog and never could abide animal cruelty but I gotta admit - there was a moment of contemplation. I had to turn it into a crashed wreck.

Dogs and wargaming don't mix.

My tip - when it breaks, repair it immediately or you may never be able to face it - like getting back onto the horse.

[Hammers]

  Good stories all around.

[Plynkes]

Unlike Unlucky General I don't get angry at my chums dropping my figures or accidentally knocking spears out of their hands and such. They are toys for playing with and a little wear and tear is to be expected. I see running repairs as simply part of the process. I care more about my clumsy careless friends than my little metal guys, and unless they are doing it maliciously and wilfully (which they never have) then all such sins are quickly and easily forgiven.

However if I ever drop somone else's figure I am mortified.  I remember I was once admiring a giraffe painted by fellow LAFer Tellus and it suddenly somehow lept from my hand and hurtled toward the floor. But displaying the reactions of a young Jonty Rhodes I managed to snatch it from the air with my other hand. So glad I did, never would have forgiven myself otherwise.

I still sometimes shudder when I think about that giraffe, and what nearly happened to it.

[Hammers]

Unlike Unlucky General I don't get angry at my chums dropping my figures or accidentally knocking spears out of their hands and such. They are toys for playing with and a little wear and tear is to be expected. I see running repairs as simply part of the process. I care more about my clumsy careless friends than my little metal guys, and unless they are doing it maliciously and wilfully (which they never have) then all such sins are quickly and easily forgiven.

However if I ever drop somone else's figure I am mortified.  I remember I was once admiring a giraffe painted by fellow LAFer Tellus and it suddenly somehow lept from my hand and hurtled toward the floor. But displaying the reactions of a young Jonty Rhodes I managed to snatch it from the air with my other hand. So glad I did, never would have forgiven myself otherwise.

I still sometimes shudder when I think about that giraffe, and what nearly happened to it.

Good man. Good catch.

[Plynkes]

You were there that day, H. Fairly sure you were in the room, or at least nearby. It was that time we went to Kiel.

My abiding memory of that trip was having strawberries for breakfast. Never done that before or since. Felt so decadent, like I was the emperor Nero or someone. Maybe that's no big deal in some places, but for a little country mouse like me, well, people around here just don't have strawberries for breakfast. We're happy if we can get a lump of stale bread with some lard spread on it.