funny and not

Mr. d, your story reminds me of a Jack Work cartoon in MR from before most of the guys reading this were born...a fellow is drinking from a mug of coffee during a club meet. Another guy tells him, " If you set that down, be VERY careful which mug you pick up." Behind the drinker is a dozen mugs, jars and such obviously full of nasty stuff.

Glad your "homer moment" wasn't worse.

h40

A paint brush in NOT a coffee stirrer!

Russ

Don't bake paint . . .

. . . on a plastic Athearn caboose.

After 30 years I still have not decided which was worse, the melted caboose (oven temp was 200 degrees for five minutes, or maybe it was closer to 10) or the odor of smoked Floquil that lingered in my college apartment for days.

Alas. ...

Don't use mom's . . .

. . . new Pyrex bread dish for mixing your first-ever batch of Hydrocal!

Linn Westcott wasn't kidding when he wrote in "Scenery for Model Railroads" that Hydrocal sets fast and hard.

What he neglected to tell me, the young impressionable reader of 16, was that unused and rapidly hardening Hydrocal would somehow bond with the glass. 

PS steam Power black

I was at an exhibition...

...one time helping a friend Rex Little (Well known in Australia) operate his Austrian H0e (H0n30) layout when one of the little Lilliput 0-6-2T locomotives started to run rough. "No worries" says Rex and reaches into the toolkit he carried in the top pocket of his Sports Coat, "A squirt of grease wil fix it!". He then proceeds to fill the gear train with super glue from the wrong tube he pulled out!

I have never seen a locomotive dissasembled as quick as that one! He had it back on the track and running sweetly that same afternnoon!

Warm garage

I was dry brushing some isopropyl on a group of weathered cars to achieve hints of fading paint. It was summer in Phoenix which means its hot so I had a really cold beer close at hand for an occasional sip. Without looking, I reached for the beer but grabbed the bottle of isopropyl and took a drink. 

My mind was simultaneously wondering why the object in my hand was neither shaped like, the same color as,  or cold like a beer bottle. Then my tongue joined the debate by screaming this ain't beer, moron!!!! I spit it out with such force I recall several teeth became loose. At least I had the presence of mind to turn away from the cars I was working on.

When I quit laughing at myself, I washed the side of my Jeep

Walther's Goo

I built a boxcar many years ago for cleaning my track.  I thought it would be amusing (and easy to find) if I gave it a unique paint scheme.  So I painted the car white and laboriously hand painted an AJAX logo on the side, made from a stencil I created from an ad in a magazine.  Hours later car was decorated and detailed, and nicely weathered.

I drilled holes in the bottom and made a masonite cleaning pad.  To weight the pad, I used Walther's Goo to glue pennies to it.  Anxious to try it all out, I picked up the car and inserted the pad, only to find I had a bit of Goo on my thumb, and there was now a great thumbprint on my hand painted AJAX logo!  

I weathered over the thumbprint the best I could.  The car is still in use today, a constant reminder of my First Grade report card when Sister Agnes Therese stated "he's messy with glue".

Not rail related

I've done plenty of what's listed here but the trifecta of goofs I know of are not rail related.

1. My mother used bleach to clean out her tea stained mugs. One day she took a swig of bleach instead of tea.

2. As a teen, trying to change the oil in my parent's car. Poured in transmission fluid instead of oil. 

3. When I did electronics repair I had a car stereo in pieces on my bench. I had fixed it and was letting it run to test. I went to the washroom and came back and could smell the distinct odour of burnt electronics. My bench was smoking. Something moved and shorted out. Left a quarter inch hole in the circuit board. 

Dumb Mistakes

A couple of years ago I was finishing up refurbishing an older loco and set it on the test track for a run. Nothing, deader than a door nail. Took it all apart and checked everything with the multimeter, all was OK. Back on the test track, again nothing. After 3 hours and 4 complete dismantles and rebuilds, I found the problem. Some dummy forgot to hook the leads from the power pack to the test track.

Building a box car kit. Dry assembled everything and checked it all out. Looked good. Started to apply the liquid cement to strategic points not realizing that the liquid tends to wick along seams a lot further than you think. I now have a box car with permanently half open doors.

I'm sure

I'm not the only one who ballasted my turnout so the points no longer moved.  

Gluey finger print - been there, done that.

Why doesn't this *!#&$## loco respond to the throttle?????  Right, I have to hook wire to the track...

I had very limited space once, so I built an HO 4x6, basically a figure 8 over and under.  Didn't even consider the inside track was going to be less than 18" radius and my 6 axle loco (the only one I owned at the time) could not negotiate it without derailing.  That was a FUN layout that lasted about 10 minutes after about 15 hours of construction.

Rattle can

I had just finished weathering a nice IC flat and reached for the dulcote to seal it up.   Painted it white instead....managed to quickly wipe most of away, but was left with an interesting effect.... 

Arrows

All I'm going to say is double check which way the arrow on top of the spray nozzle on your rattle can paint is pointing before you push it down!

George

laughed out loud...LOL I think they use for text

because I have been guilty of a few of those...brought back memories..

One other note..always look at which end of the soldering iron you are about to grab.

Bill Michael

Oh yeah

Reminds me of an evening spent carefully and painstakingly removing tall ladders while updating a '60s box car  -- only to discover I was working on the wrong end of the car . . .

I'm wondering if . . .

. . . one or two of these could be added to the MRH "Derailments" page every other issue or so?

It's fun to laugh at ourselves, don't you think?

One of my best goofs was

One of my best goofs was building a branch line blue print car very early in my kit building days. I had gone to them from blue box kits and it was a shock. Each kit I built turned out much better than the last till I was able to build one that I was quite proud of. As I was working on the kit feeling quite proud of myself for getting all the little parts in the right places and no glue smears I placed the kit on its side to put the last door on and noticed it went right into the puddle of glue I was using. It is funny now but it was not funny to me at the time.

Dullcoat??

Built a small industry and laboriously lettered it named after a good friend.  Last step was to rattle-can dullcoat it.  Half a second later, I realized the can was flat black spray paint.  I had applied it lightly to one area (right on some of the lettering, of course).  Checked with the friend and we decided to leave it as is.  Looks like there was a small fire adjacent to the building.  A small additional amount of Bragdon powder later, I couldn't have gotten as good an effect if I tried.

These are funny

Great responses. Laugh out loud funny.

Recent oopsie

I just went down to my basement work area this week to grab something and thought everything smelled wonderfully like pine. 

Flashback a couple months and I'm at Hobby Lobby, buying some Grumbacher turpentine to make some Mike Confalone weathering washes. In the same aisle are some neat little clear plastic jars with lids, maybe 3/4 or 1 oz., which I figure would help ration out that liquid gold turpentine.

Back to this week, I look down on my card table workbench to see that the turpentine has melted the plastic jar into a puddle of pine-scented modern art! So, no turpentine in plastic, got it.

Mike in CO

Teen Years

As an adult I can site a lot of the same stories, as a teen....

At around 12-13 I discovered flex track. Back then it was made with fiber ties and staples. HO and the staples were small. Humidity- whatever that was didn't enter the thought process. We lived in LA at the time and back then CA got rain on a pretty regular basis about once a year. Went out to the garage after school one day and discovered why flex track with fiber ties was a really bad idea. A couple of major kinks. When I went down to the hobby shop next time I discovered that flex track also came with plastic ties. Worked a whole lot better.

At about the same time I started to read MR on a regular basis and was really impressed with having scenery at different levels. I talked my parents into letting me have part of an adjacent corner and stuck a branch down to the new level which had a drop of about 4in. Looked good so time for a test. Had an 0-6-0 which of course back then had 2 speeds, stop and fast. Not sure what the term is for the curve at the bottom or top of a hill, but on that section both were very short. Engine went up and down. It could handle one car and if I didn't turn off the control knob fast enough it went off the track at the bottom because it was so short.

Jack

ACC.....

I'm sure we all have stories like this to share.

pqe

Coffee spitters

Great thread. I nearly spit up my coffee a couple of times as so many of these hit home but I'd never admit to them!  Be careful about laughing too hard as the next thing you know I'm glueing an Nn3 caboose together and managed to push the bottle off my off the mat on my workbench. Of course it flowed all over and on to the floor. My wife didn't say anything for a couple of days since odd smells seem to the the MO in that corner of the room. Sorry!!!

At a round robin work session

I was at a round robin work session several years ago now. The layout-a-building was in the basement of a modeler who had just moved into a new house with a nice tight-weave carpet in the downstairs area where the layout was. There was also a workbench in one corner of this room.

An older modeler who couldn't see so well had on an optivisor and was installing decoders in locos. He had a soldering iron fired up and it slipped off the workbench onto the carpet. He didn't see it and it was going like gangbusters burning a nice black spot in this brand new carpet.

I walked by and I saw the soldering iron down on the carpet, but too late! Needless to say, the layout owner was not pleased (I bet the wife was even less pleased later). The ambitious older guy meant well, but with his less-than-great eyesight (except with an optivisor on), he completely missed that the soldering iron had rolled off and was now down under the workbench burning its way through the carpet into the floor boards.

Perfect example of why a soldering iron stand is a GOOD idea!