Starve Your Carpet Monster

by Reg Hardy
(SMH Editor)

Here is a method for putting your carpet monster on a strict diet and keeping yourself off your hands and knees looking for that scale model critically important dropped part. We’ve all been there and sworn we wouldn’t return.

But just as certain as night follows day, pick up that tiny, critical part with a pair of tweezers and sooner than you can utter “oh fudge”, those blades click together metal-to-metal and that part you put all that work into takes off for parts unknown. Yup, it can go anywhere in a 360 degree circle. What you can you can bet on is it wasn’t the 180 degrees towards your work table.

Here is another reason I am glad I placed a piece of sheet steel on my workbench surface and it is another use for magnets.

I grab one of my older button-down-collar shirts (you know, the one with the pink checks) and place the shirt-tails on the steel and hold it in place with a two or three magnets. I skim a belt through the collar where a necktie would normally have been threaded and hitch it around my waste.

Now I have a workbench-sized catcher’s mitt which collars the lion’s share of the parts dropped in the modeling process.
The long sleeves of the shirt are ideal for quick clean-ups of paint spills, glue miss-dabs and cleaning brushes.

Of course you don’t want to be caught dead putting it in with the normal washing. Wive’s tend to frown on such activity.