It occurred to me that most of the time I spend modelling is wasted waiting of glue or paint to dry. As a remedy to this I have been swapping off between building models and painting minis. This is less than effective because I have to have both all of my modelling tools and all of my painting supplies out at the same time. Inspired by my BF-109 build it occurred to me that I should do the "Henry Ford" thing, in other words go all-in on mass producing models instead of building them one at a time.
A quick review of the Pile of Embarrassment showed that my most prolific model airplane was the Airfix Henschel Hs-123. Frankly I was a bit surprised by that fact but, in my defense, I had purchased them before I started tracking my inventory. As it is an excellent kit and was used by three different air forces it was a perfect model to test my theory. So I cleared my decks and dove into the five of them. In an effort to see just how effective (or inefficient) this approach was I kept track of time spent on this project. Normally it takes three to four days to complete a model, so we shall see how this pans out.
NOTE: I started on Monday morning
a quick review of the contents (some were purchased at garage sales)
to ensure that all the kits were complete, as you can see it is a simple kit
10 minutes
fuselage assembly: installing the seat, gluing together the halves and filing/sanding the seam lines, while the glue was drying on that I collected the upper and lower wings and cleaned up the molding-ports and flash, as soon as that was finished I began installing the lower wings
60 minutes
as the lower wings were drying I assembled the engine/exhaust/cowling groups
this is where mass-builds really speeds things up,
the first one teaches you the way to build the item, then you just repeat the process
30 minutes
but, in my haste I had forgotten to install my steel nail in thew fuselage to ensure that the models would mount on my magnetic flight stands, happily I realized this before I had installed the engines
zero minutes, much embarrassment
the fix was easy enough, simply insert the nail through the opening at the front of the fuselage
and use a magnetic flight stand the hold the nail steady
10 minutes (mostly in rounding up the flight stands)
with the nail held in place by the magnet a drop of super glue is added to keep it in place
5 minutes
the next step was assembling the landing gear, this took a while as the parts are tiny and my fat fingers are not, plus there was an prominent mold-tower on the inside of each spat as well as a goodly amount of filing and sanding on the seams, the tailplanes went on without a hitch
75minutes
Airfix took a page from Monogram and molded the cabane struts into the fuselage sides which greatly sped up the mounting of the top wing, then I double-checked to make sure that the landing gear were drying straight, then I mounted the engine/cowling assemblies to the front of the fuselage
15 minutes
the inter-plane struts were easy to mount as well, they are one solid strut rather then the usual two spindly sticks and had well-defined placement holes in the wings
25 minutes
the final act was the footsteps and radio aerials, the combination of tiny parts and fat fingers meant that this took an absurdly long time, I then cleaned up the pilot figures and prepped them for painting
40 minutes
It as only after I was finished that I realized that I had no benchmark to test my speed against (not having kept careful track of the time spent on any other build). I'm not certain that this was faster, it certainly felt faster. I got five models from box to painting bench in three days which is roughly how long it takes to get one model sorted. Of these five one is destined to go to the Spanish Civil War, one to the Nationalist Chinese Air Force and the balance will go to the Luftwaffe. I will have to see if mass-painting speeds things as well.
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