The Most Important Tool at the Bench?

The X-Acto knife?  The ruler?  Super-glue?  A large hammer?  Asking which tool is the most important is like asking which is your favorite child or how high is “up”.  Every model builder will have a different answer and they all will be wrong.  They are wrong because the right answer is the Cell Phone.  (Pause for loud groaning and cat-calls.)  Yes, the cell phone is the most important tool, and not because it links modelers together, and not because it has access to Siri who knows everything, and not because it gives modelers access to the Internet where all facts are stored.  The cell phone is the most important tool because it takes pictures.  Or at least some of them do, and the ones that do have transformed our hobby.  Images, after all, are what we are all about.

Consider the role of magazines.  For younger readers it might be useful to explain.  Once upon a time,  Magazines— things made of paper pages which had pictures and words and which arrived in the mail on a monthly basis, or, worst case, arrived at the hobby shop* at regular intervals—Magazines delivered to us the precious images of other people’s models which served to inspire us and to show the way to greater and greater models.  Better still, magazines delivered to us advertisements (an archaic form of the word ad) which gave us the power of dreams and the need for money, hence greasing the wheels of progress, but that is another story for another time.  For now, we are interested in the power of images, and magazines delivered an abundance of images.  

It is true that the cell phone can perform the same function, but the greater value of the cell phone is hidden in its innards and hinted at by the pea-sized lens that in turn hints at the greater power of the camera within.  Who woulda thunk it?  A phone that takes pictures.  Go figure.

Old stuff, you might say, squirming with boredom and edging toward the shift button, but wait, here’s the beef:  Use the camera on the cell phone to record what it is you are doing at your bench. Holy poops.  What a concept.  No more forgetting what you did or how you did it.  No more squirming in embarrassment that you can’t put into words what you need from the machine tool dealer.  No more failing to notice what should have been obvious but was only noticed once the model was assembled.  YeeHaw!

Of course, the cell phone can be of use in taking nice pictures of a finished model, pictures that render the film camera to the hands of Photographers and Serious Journalists/Historians and other bookish sorts, but the phone’s true calling is to aid us model builders in our journey from bunches of parts on a bench to a finished model of something wonderful.  Goodness knows we need all the help we can get, and to our everlasting delight, the cell phone provides help.  Besides, as we all know, it is important to keep our phones on the work bench at all times so we don’t miss any calls.

David Cox

* In the olden days, there were these things called ‘hobby shops’ where model builders gathered to soak up the air conditioning (or heat) and where magazines were on racks and could be read for for free.