"And te tide and te time þat tu iboren were, schal beon iblescet." - "the tide abides for, tarrieth for no man, stays no man, tide nor time tarrieth no man" ~ St. Marher, 1225
The march of time and age has caught up to this scale modeler. I have noticed recently that my close vision acuity has slowly eroded.
Every one says that the fiddly bits are the hardest part of scale modeling to do. Even more so after 40. I have started noticing the problematic situation that develops when you have presbyopia - This loss of focusing ability for near vision due to the inflexibility of the focusing lens in your eye. A photography analogy would be when your focusing element for your macro lens goes all wonky and jams. I find myself rubbing my eyes more due to dryness. If I bring a model part up close to my eyes to ascertain the detail work needed it goes all blurry.
The inherent miniscule size of the detail work in 1/48 scale modeling (heck...I'm not even going to touch 1/72 scale any more) now either involves getting a large magnifying lamp with a large magnifier element (the one I have is too small or wearing magnifying glasses and I need to find one that minimizes the diffraction (think putting a straw in a glass and looking at it: it looks bent or broken in two). I need to know where my hands are on the kit so that I don't screw up a panel line or something. I don't like things around my head, wearing a magnifier glass would involve so much frustration that I would more than likely throw the model kit or the glasses out the open window in anger.
I'm getting the feeling that it's more than time to start switching scales to 1/32 and I hate to do that because it's going to involve selling the majority of 1/48 kits that I have collected over the years. I don't have 100s of kits but it looks to be about 58 kits that I have that are 48 scale. I don't see any chance of my near vision problems clearing up due to my age and I'm not too certain if there is a simple solution to focusing on detail work such as the cockpit fiddly bits without getting driven insane by all the small work needed. To give you an idea, if I hold a small figure at any point less than 3/4 of a foot away from my eyes the detail on the figure degenerates into a blur. So if I am to work on a 1/48 fiddly bit I'm going to have to get a magnifier somewhere in the neighborhood of 10x-20x magnification. It's either that or sell the majority of my 1/48 scale kits and switch to 1/32. Maybe being able to actually see what the hell I'm doing may get me back to the model-bench.
Considering my start to finish ratio... 0% in the past 6 years, I need some sort of kick in the gluteous maximus to get me to start working on something. Detail work frustrates the living daylights out of me to no end, but the OCD part of me figures that it doesn't do anything for a model if you put in a half-baked, half finished cockpit into a model that you do well...on the outside. So I want to do well on the cockpits too...and the smaller the pieces the more problem with seeing and the more frustrated I get. I guess that's probably why in the past 2 years I haven't wanted to work on anything because of the vision problems. And at one point in my lifetime, I had 20/20 in one eye and 20/10 in the other.
The young guys need to appreciate their visual acuity while they still have it. ...because all too soon...
