Can You Ever Have Enough Tools?

Okay, if I wasn't sure before, I am sure now.  I have a very bad habit of buying tools for my hobbies.  I went to the hobby store, planning strongly to resist any purchasing of tools and magazines.  I even took a friend--you know, don't go swimming without a buddy, hoping that they would help me be the voice of reason, or at least restraint.

No such luck.

I don't mean to blame my friend.  They would have restrained me if I had asked.  I just didn't ask and proceeded to the checkout very quickly.  I am my own worst enemy....I guess.

On the bright side, I do think I made a good purchase.  I have a lot of train buildings to assemble and not one of them has a square edge.  What?  That's right.  I have to assemble about 20 buildings for my train layout, and not one of them has a straight edge.  You see, to facilitate the manufacturing process, the moulds all have "draft" edges, so they will pop out of the machine easily.  Hmmmm?  You'd think with today's technology there would be another way around this--but what do I know of injection moulding?  In the end, I have to sand the edges until they are 90 degrees.

You might remember a post where I created my own sanding board.  That worked well, but provided no way to evaluate my work.  This tool should do the same thing, and allow me to be a bit more uniform.

My friend, and several people at the shop, said I was making a wise purchase.  They explained that while I didn't need the tools, the proper tools make things go so much easier.

Any thoughts.

Nothing But Blue Sky

I do indeed like doing puzzles, but they often come to the same conclusion.  I quickly assemble the edges (Sheldon Cooper would be so proud), and sort the sky, sky and land, and land parts.  Then I assemble the edges where the sky and land meet.  Then I fill in the land parts.

Then I am left with the sky.

The Blue sky.

As you can see, I might have left the daunting part for last.  Actually, there is no "might" about it.  I have left the most daunting part last.  If not for clouds and sky gradation, I would have to try each piece in each part.  No, that's not true. I would have to try half the parts (the vertical versus the horizontal parts) in each spot.

As for this puzzle, also another dollar store find, it was of much better quality than the last one.  It was a little more challenging to assemble, but that is probably a good thing.  I also appreciated being able to use the box bottom as a sorting tray--something I was not able to do in the last puzzle.

I think this is my last puzzle for the foreseeable future--but who knows.

The Statue of Liberty in Nanoblocks

I hadn't had a chance to put together some nanoblocks for quite a while now.  If you watched my YouTube video, you will know that I opened up the Statue of Liberty kit, but didn't actually put it together.  Finally the opportunity to put it together came.

A close-up of the base

I hadn't done one of these for a while, so I was a little surprised at how difficult this one was.  The instructions were pretty solid, but this one was hard.  I guess it had a lot to do with the fact that this one is not symmetrical.  I really had to pay attention to this one, and as any hobbyist will tell you, concentration is taxing.



The Lady is ready

I enjoyed building this one, but don't think the result was particularly amazing.  I just don't see a lot of detail in this one that I would like to see.  Perhaps the only way to do that is to either make it twice the size or fabricate a lot of specialty parts.  The former would make the price to high, and the latter would affect production cost and time.

When I first looked at this kit, I thought the blue bricks were quite interesting, but outside the box they didn't really strike me as different at all.  Ten years from now, if nanoblocks are still growing strong, perhaps my thinking will change.



There were quite a few leftover parts, and my collection of them is growing.  I should start to think about what I would like to build with them.  I am thinking something architectural, but I have no idea yet.



leftovers

I checked the Japanese homepage of nanoblocks (yes, I know a little Japanese) and have discovered that they have quite a few new releases.  I don't know when (or if ever) they will come here, but I am hopeful.



The growing collection of leftovers