.. what's on the bench?

 its sometimes hard enough getting down to some modelling let alone having to actually think about why I do what I do and write about it every week....but here's a blog post that I can write without too much thought - the bench!

My bench (below, click to see the full picture) perches on top of the dryer in my garage - it is literally a bench. Its about the size of a kitchen table - that's probably because it is an old kitchen table - minus its legs.

I have a few shelves and units up for displaying old models ..though the decent looking models go straight into old shoe boxes and storage..never to be seen again. I'm not too sure why; they sure aren't good enough for any sort of competition, I'm not a member of any club and I never display them anywhere. Perhaps one day I might invest in a display cabinet. Although all you can see here are 1:72nd scale aircraft I build armour, ships and cars - although I have yet to show anything like that here. There is also a pile of Kagero 'Topcolors' books on one of the shelves - you can't really beat this series for a quick walkaround or reference pic when in the middle of a busy modelling session - all my other reference is located away out of sight - except for the magazine pile which I reckon is about 10 feet high !

..funny no matter how organised I might be I always end up working in a tiny corner piece of what is quite a large working area while debris and kits and tools and paints pile up across the table top..
The Fw 190 artwork on the far shelf unit is a Thierry Dekker framed and signed original acrylic painted artwork. Thierry has been a friend of mine from way back when he was starting out with his profile artwork. We ended up doing a book together "Profile Hangar" which is still available from Thierry's blog..the radio/cassette on the shelf is tuned in permanently to 'France infos' and I listen to French radio programmes almost exclusively, so modelling is also a good time to learn new vocabulary and keep my language skills up to scratch.

As you can see I like to keep everything out and then I'm ready to go at a moment's notice - I try and do a little bit of 'something' at least once a day, but with quite a few part-started kits on the go, progress can sometimes be rather slow!
A view of the other side of the bench - another crammed table, more part-started kits and a few built-up ones on 'display'....

to see more benches at the following links..

yet another plastic modeller
Migrant's Wanderings
Gregs Models
digital sprue
Motorsport Modeller Blog
Jay's Scale Model Adventures