I would like to put out an all call for all of the mistakes that you all have sitting out your shelves. I’m at work right now but in the next few days I will get my own pictures up of a terrible color choice that I made on a Jeep that I painted. So, let’s see those mess ups, mistakes and creative choices that just did not pan out. Don’t be mean this is just for fun.
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Just look at anything I ever posted. I don’t have a mistake free build yet. Seriously, plenty of mistakes in all my builds. From the flat coat on the Fahrpanzer to the glue smudge on the floor of the gama coat trailer just to name two off hand.
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Just wait till i get those pics of mine up you’re going to look and just say oof
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Oh, we don’t make mistakes… We just have “happy little accidents”! LOL!
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The problem is I usually don’t take photos of my mistakes, that way there is no evidence to use against me.
Ken
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I think this is supposed to be a receptacle for an infantry phone, at least that’s what I was told by another modeler on this site, can’t remember who. I thought it was a tail light of some sort. I still have to correct it as this model is going into a diorama.
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Try not to laugh too hard! 
…
A while back, I glued the diamond-tread flooring totally upside-down… in a “Diamond-T 968!”
The following photo was taken post recovery!
More recently, I cut-out the back of this tarp to open it up for cargo viewing. I added Styrene stays to be really cool. One month later, I realized it was the wrong end!
Note the misaligned stays in relation to the cargo bed sides.
The following photo was taken post recovery!
D’Oh!!! 
—mike
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I was making good time cutting and extending the hull of a JLTV recently, when it was pointed out to me by @Uncle-Heavy and @Tank_1812 that well, I didn’t extend the frame far enough - perfect. So, out came the saw, and in went more styrene:
On the right you can see it cut back in two, and one the left, fixed… 
Happily, when it was done, despite the cut, it sits on all four!
Cheers
Nick
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I never admitted to anything! Somebody leaked those mistakes!!! 
—mike
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I’ve just watched an episode of “Forged in Fire” where one of the contestants said “There are no such things as mistakes; just happy accidents” (a Bob Ross quote?) before adding “Except my brother, he was a mistake…”.
Cheers,
M
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As promised the messed up jeep. I generally use spray paint and tried to use one called army green. I’m not sure what army but not one I have ever seen.
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You know how it goes, you spend hours doing your research and are convinced you’ve achieved perfect authenticity. No doubt about it, nobody & no evidence can possibly contradict you, right?
So I was scratch-building an inter-war Prague trailer-tram, but only found one photo-reference for the interior seating. Good enough for me, let’s do it…
Great. But just at that very moment a friend put me in touch with a tour-guide in Prague, who agreed to go to their Transport Museum to take photos for me of the exterior of the particular trailer-tram I was replicating. Wonderful, and very useful…but the curator had also allowed her on board to take photos of the interior too, which she sent me as an afterthought…
DOH! Having cut up the kit’s bench seat on the starboard side I had to reverse the process, not so easy let me tell you, and I’d got the partitions all wrong too (there weren’t any)…
I don’t know what the moral of that story is, maybe this: you’re always right until you’re wrong.
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I probably should have credited Bob Ross with saying that, but I kind of thought that pretty much everyone would recognize his catch phrase statement about the creative process.
Regarding Tim’s story about the Prague tram, I’d offer up the “Research Corollary to Murphy’s Law” which states, “The final bit of information necessary to complete any project accurately always manifests itself as soon as you have put the final touches to that project.”
Sadly, I’m all too familiar with “The Research Corollary”! LOL!
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Oh yes, I’ve made plenty of mistakes! In fact too many to publish here. From divisional signs carefully applied to vehicles they never used, Panthers and PzIVs lacking Zimmerit and dodgy colour schemes based on the colour mix for Dunkelgelb suggested in 70s Tamiya instructions and whatever Humbrol colours I had in stock. Most due to lack of or faulty research (using Panzer Colours!?). My excuse is that I was a lot younger, that kits of those days never had Zimmerit or even mentioned it, and the experts I copied made similar errors (even the great Francois Verlinden). There is a lot more information out there today at the click of a button, but we had to rely on the latest publications.
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I didn’t pay close enough attention to the instructions or something, but I ended up putting the tracks on wrong (leaving the little overlap at the top back of the track) and I didn’t glue the rubber pads in on the right place, so the right-side tracks are just an entire mistake! (not to mention that I glued the road wheels on before assembling the tracks…
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H.P.
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This is “Derby”, a Dragon M4A1 that I built as my first reemergence into modeling 30 years ago. At the time I thought I did an excellent job on it, adding lots of scratch detail. I got the markings profile from a color plate in the Concord book “The M4 Sherman At War” by Steven Zaloga. The only thing was, in the color profile “Derby” had the black camouflage bands on it. It had been a long time since I had used an airbrush and I had just barely gotten the olive drab on without messing it up, so I decided to forgo the black bands. Besides, it wasn’t like Steve Zaloga was ever going to see my model!
Fast forward 6 months to the first meeting of AMPS Connecticut Chapter and I’ve proudly got my M4A1 on the table along with other’s models. And who walks in but Steve Zaloga! He lives only 30 minutes away! What I thought could never in a million years happen happened, he looked at my model, and commented that I should put black camo bands on it. Huge mistake and I swear this is a true story!
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I’m a little jealous your mistake looks better than anything that I am actually trying to do.
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