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So I got a FW model(Rvarna) and one of the fins on the guns broke off a flew somewhere and I didnt see. I spent an hour looking for it, till I gave up and am just going to recreate it with plasticard. I found several other bits looking for it. So somewhere along the line when I look for another one I will ffind it
What is you stupid Bit story?

Indeed... it's always something small and innocuous, but essential for completing the model.

I dropped a pair of ears for an Orc Boar once. There are only 5 pairs in the box and you can't very well not have them on the model without it looking daft.

It took me an entire morning to find them.

Take a vacum and panty hose.
Put the ose over the nozel and go over the whoe area [i sugest the whole room, bit have legs I tell you!]. It should work, it does for contacts.

 Anpu42 wrote:
Take a vacum and panty hose.
Put the hose over the nozel and go over the whoe area [i sugest the whole room, bit have legs I tell you!]. It should work, it does for contacts.

Lol
I love the idea that you need to use panty-hose because bits have legs....lol

Also, great idea

Alex

It’s a catch-22

If you have a carpet, it will eat your bits.

If you have concrete/wood/other hard floor every time you drop something it will shatter into a thousand pieces across the room.

The answer of course it to floor your hobby room with inch thick foam.

I think the most ridiculous I've had is Solomon Lok's servo-skull. While gluing it (with superglue because it was resin) I dropped one of the 'arms', and couldn't find it at all. Two weeks later, I found the offending piece of resin, glued to the outside of my trousers. It had survived being washed several times and was still stuck on there!

 Nevelon wrote:
It’s a catch-22

If you have a carpet, it will eat your bits.

If you have concrete/wood/other hard floor every time you drop something it will shatter into a thousand pieces across the room.

The answer of course it to floor your hobby room with inch thick foam.

QFT

I have had countless bits vanish into carpets in my time. But worse still are wooden floors. Our house is Victorian, and upstairs there are gaps between the boards just large enough for a bit to fall down. Atleast if it hits a carpet you have a chance. If it hits a gap, its gone for good.
Oh, and i dropped my Blood Island elf commander fecently. A single talon shot off onto the carpet. It took me about 15 minutes to find it.

Dropped a hand from the sternguard kit onto the floor. Searched for 5 Minutes, then gave up. 10 minutes later, my cat was licking on something. It was the hand.

I have a metal yard ruler, a flashlight and actually lie down with my head on one side to see the bits on the floor, as I am prone to dropping the small stuff... still, didn't find that necron overlord's lower jaw i removed the other day...

I'm fairly certain the chemical makeup of any bit dropped on carpet is radically changed upon striking the floor; either they develop chameleonic traits or become so overcharged with energy they rocket off to Neptune.

Was rearranging bitz boxes for the past two days and I swear I'm down 1/3 of what I started with simply because of them falling on the floor.

I manage to drop a Dire Avenger arm into my pocket. Found it a few days later.

While building my TK army i was clipping parts and sorting them into a plastic bead storage box with 32 compartments. The box had a hinged lid which was all the way open and resting on the table behind it. My cat, who was a kitten back then, jumped up on to the table and landed on the box lid. This cased a catapult-like effect and all of the bits went flying across the table and kitchen. I am not sure if i ever found them all.

It happened to me a few times most parts i find again, annoying thing is tiny parts i cut and file and then fall never to be found again, them aliens again!

Put a pair of panty hose over a vacuum cleaner nozzle and vacuum. The hose will prevent the bits from getting sucked into the bin.

 hotsauceman1 wrote:
So I got a FW model(Rvarna) and one of the fins on the guns broke off a flew somewhere and I didnt see. I spent an hour looking for it, till I gave up and am just going to recreate it with plasticard. I found several other bits looking for it. So somewhere along the line when I look for another one I will ffind it
What is you stupid Bit story?

I was assembling my Hell Dorado Sentinel one fine day a couple of years ago... Do you see the spikes on his shoulder pads?


They are separate pieces. Each one is nothing more than a teeny-tiny sliver of metal. They were so small and smooth that my tweezers couldn't grasp them properly; they would just cause the spikes to shoot out in random directions. I spent more time searching for each spike than I did assembling the model and the five models before it. I ended up using a toothpick with superglue on the end to sticky-hand them into place, then another toothpick and the throbbing veins in my eye to slide them into place, turn them around and keep them from flopping over.

Except for the last one. That one fell. Then it was gone. Disappeared. Houdinied. Frodoed. Keyser Sozed. Pulled a full-on Carmen Sandiego. You get the idea.


So, I had a model I had been incredibly excited about now reduced to 3 out of 4 armor spikes. He went from Captain "I'll Make a Man out of You" Shang to Frank Drebin. I couldn't even look at that model anymore. Every now and then, I would take out the flashlight and search for that spike. I used tape on the carpet to see what I turned up. Every time I swept or vacumed, I squinted and searched. Eventually, we moved.


But the story doesn't end there!


In our new place, most of my models have remained in their boxes, the boxes in their stacks, the stacks in their closet, their closet in the cold, dark study. I probably wouldn't have seen the model again if I hadn't found the 2010 version of Three Kingdoms on youtube. So, I decided to dig out that model. There was a lot of shifting and sifting involved, but I finally found him. I decided I would just pull off the other spikes and cover the holes with greenstuff jewels. I got out my needle-nosed pliers when I noticed one of his feet wasn't cleaned properly. I couldn't believe I had missed so much flash.

That wasn't fash! That was the missing spike, glued to his foot the entire time! Away go the pliers and out come the tweezers. I took him into the restroom because it had the brightest light in the house at the time. And then...

Pop!

MOTHERFLOGGER!!!!!!!!!!!!

Not in the toilet--please not in the toilet!


Nope, just on the back of the seat, near the hinge. I was able to save the spike! Now my sentinel has all of his spikes!


Some day, I might even paint him.


On the other hand, one of my Mantic Elohi's heads shot off into the dark and I just let it go. Who the hell did he think he was that I would care?

I magnetised the ends of a Wraithlord shoulder axle, where the arms attach.
In the garage, spraying it all with undercoat, and boing, onto the floor. Being magnetised, I've given up hope of ever finding it.

 hotsauceman1 wrote:
So I got a FW model(Rvarna) and one of the fins on the guns broke off a flew somewhere and I didnt see. I spent an hour looking for it, till I gave up and am just going to recreate it with plasticard. I found several other bits looking for it. So somewhere along the line when I look for another one I will ffind it

Walk around bare foot.

You'll find it then, especially if it has really sharp or pointy bits.

 reds8n wrote:

 hotsauceman1 wrote:
So I got a FW model(Rvarna) and one of the fins on the guns broke off a flew somewhere and I didnt see. I spent an hour looking for it, till I gave up and am just going to recreate it with plasticard. I found several other bits looking for it. So somewhere along the line when I look for another one I will ffind it

Walk around bare foot.

You'll find it then, especially if it has really sharp or pointy bits.

Thats excessivelly cruel but entertaining advice

At the FLGS the local club had a bits swap party. I had several bits containers with me stacked on a table. Someone bumped the table and one container fell, opened and dumped everything out. About half my bits went into the heating vent. Had to remove 4x 3 inch screws with a multi tool knife to pull the vent.

My hobby area is a finished attic with deep pile shag carpet. I do not care to relive my bits dropping trauma here...

When they remodeled the floor of the game room at the flgs they put down one of those garage flooring coat things, where it's a liquid epoxy or resin or something, then you scatter colored chips on it for decoration, and seal the whole thing in a nice gloss. The final thing is a speckled pattern of white, light grey, dark grey, and black. Each speckle is roughly pencil eraser diameter. You drop bitz on that floor and good luck finding them. Hell, I've dropped a quarter and then couldn't see it. It's So Much worse than any carpet I've dropped bitz onto.

 snurl wrote:
While building my TK army i was clipping parts and sorting them into a plastic bead storage box with 32 compartments. The box had a hinged lid which was all the way open and resting on the table behind it. My cat, who was a kitten back then, jumped up on to the table and landed on the box lid. This cased a catapult-like effect and all of the bits went flying across the table and kitchen. I am not sure if i ever found them all.

For some reason this story strikes me as the most unfortunate. I want to be mad at your kitten, but it's so hard to be mad at a kitten.

My story is similar. My cat was lounging around one morning while I was clipping some bits off of sprue. One of the bits rocketed off of the sprue and the cat was after it like a rocket. It took me 10 minutes to get it from her. Now though, every time she sees me with my models out, she will stalk me and wait for me to make a mistake. She has claimed a few bits as her own never to be recovered and I suspect she will get more.

Yes the cat was having a whale of a time batting stuff around.
Do you know how many skulls there are in 3 boxes of TK skeletons? I never will.

Frankenberry wrote:I'm fairly certain the chemical makeup of any bit dropped on carpet is radically changed upon striking the floor; either they develop chameleonic traits or become so overcharged with energy they rocket off to Neptune.

Was rearranging bitz boxes for the past two days and I swear I'm down 1/3 of what I started with simply because of them falling on the floor.

What? didn't you ever take Hobby Physics 101 (I thought this was a free lecture offered by FLGS whever someone buys a starter box.

'Bitz' (or as us in the hobby physics field, call 'modellions') are the fundamental particles of models.
As with the standard model, every particle has an equal but oppositely charged particle (In this case, the carpeticon)
When a modellion and a carpeticon interact, the particle and anti-particle annihilate each other.

It's why bitz disappear when they hit the floor, and why your hobby room carpet seems to develop bare patches over time...

My cat made off with a full Apothacary. Never found it. I have since moved and it never turned up. I've always been able to snag bits I dropped on carpets though through enough hard work. But it has been known to take an hour.

My old local gw had a carpet the exact same grey as the plastic, allegations this was gws way of reacquiring plastic cheaply we're never proved, but one of the staff members (when there were staff) built a model from bits he found on the floor when hoovering

I am in a wheelchair and I have some pockets on the arms of it. I lost a Plasma Gun on the floor I though. We crawled on the floor and pulled everything out at least twice.
Then while trying to get a quarter out of one of the pockets I found the Plasma Gun.

One time the backs of one of the lychguard I was building miraculously vanished. I spent a week looking for that damned piece, and I gave up and just ordered a spare off Ebay.

A favorite story along this vein was one I heard on the WWPD podcast. one of their guys was assembling the big armored train, possibly for someone else, and had bits out on a side porch to primer. Something happened, and a tiny smokestack or similar went through a crack in the plans of the porch...

...It gets worse...

...Into the under-porch area, home to dirt, debris, and something a dog had produced, if you get my drift. The guy did find, but I think it took him a couple hours to do so.

ahzek wrote:
My old local gw had a carpet the exact same grey as the plastic, allegations this was gws way of reacquiring plastic cheaply we're never proved, but one of the staff members (when there were staff) built a model from bits he found on the floor when hoovering

They must have gotten that carpet from the same place my last landlord got his.

MAN that was a pain, trying to find bits on that carpet.