Beardie

there are two here (Both the roads into my village are long and winding and rather fun when there's no-one about)

it's tea break again (I very occasionally do stuff between tea breaks)

On your Ginger nut

unless you break wind (Then everyone notices you all of a sudden)

be a Lazy Boy

who's winding you up

the humour isn't funny

are there good leaks?

who had gone bananas

fuelled by glue fumes

I've just received an email from Airfix to tell me that a replacement part is going to be dispatched today so hopefully all is now sorted. Hopefully it is just a case of things slipping past QC. If I hadn't noticed another modeller commenting on the problem I wouldn't have checked my own kits and would have only discovered the problem at least a month or so down the line as there is a long queue of kits waiting to be built before I will get to the Airfix kit including battering an Italeri 1/72 Hornisse to death first as a practice run.

step two Burn It! (Instructions are for wimps)

due to Step One (Origami Boxers would be rather uncomfortable undercrackers)

As I said @Graham Boak I have no real detailed knowledge of the injection moulding process and I can well see how you may be right and simply, at some point, the mould cooled sufficiently or had a cold spot so that the styrene solidified before the feed from one side of the part met the feed from the other. I also have experience working in graphic design and typesetting so I well know how easy it is to miss even some enormous howlers of faults so I wouldn't say it's any reflection on Airfix as a company. Mistakes, errors and accidents happen to us all and it's how we deal with them that matters. The one thing I would say is that what mine looks like and what another fellows photo's of his looks like is identical so either exactly the same thing occurred twice, there were a number like this either with most being caught at QC or escaping into the wild or there was more than one impression of the parts tree with one being faulty and one or more being fine. As you say, it may well be that the mould had a cold spot and, until that spot got up to temperature the styrene didn't meet in the middle.

I sent Airfix a photo of the fault, still unopened in the bag and clearly visible along with the 'trace code' sticker on the bottom of the box. They have sent an email back asking me to unbag the kit, check the rest of it and send them a photo 'of the whole part'. I'll do this and see what they say. The fact that the fault with one of my kits is identical to the fault with another chaps kit would suggest that there may be a problem with the mould. I know virtually nothing about injection moulding but I wonder if there is more than one copy of the parts tree in the moulds. If so that would raise the worrying possibility that half, a quarter, an eighth of all kits produced might be knackered. If so and no-one picked up the fault I would imagine there would be hell to pay for someone.

of the Arctic circle

Hoping you might leave

who are rather abrasive

I just looked over my two copies of the new Airfix Me410 kit following a tip-off and discovered that while one appears perfectly good (I haven't actually opened the bags to inspect the parts trees thoroughly) the other has a section of the lower wing piece that has failed to mould, is short shot, so there is a gap in the outer wing between the engine nacelle and the wingtip. Has anyone else got a kit with this flaw?

if they had hands

that makes me chuck

that doubles the value

more dangerous than chainsaws

at old fish face

battering everyone with it (Is a Braille instruction manual the blind leading the blind?)